Ellen Moir, Dara Barlin, Janet Gless, and Jan Miles, New Teacher Center
Harvard Education Press
2009
This volume is the work of the New Teacher Center (NTC) at UC-Santa Cruz, a comprehensive teacher mentoring and professional development outfit. You may recall that the federal Institute of Education Sciences used NTC’s program as one of the two “comprehensive” treatments in its Comprehensive Teacher Induction study (find year one and year two results here; year three is underway). To date, that study has found meager effectiveness gains from teacher induction and mentoring programs. Undaunted, NTC insists that, through instructionally-intensive, high-quality mentor training, districts can ensure higher teacher retention rates and improve instructional quality. Here they describe how their program has been implemented in four cities: Durham, Boston, New York City, and Chicago. Looks encouraging for teacher retention at least, but this is not a statistical analysis. There is no control for other changes underway in those districts or any proof of causality. On balance, this book describes an appealing program but fails to rebut the IES findings. You can purchase it here.