This fall Moorhead Area Public Schools implemented a formal new teacher mentorship program. Although the district has a long tradition of providing an orientation process for new teachers, the design of the current program more closely resembles best practice, said Missy Eidsness, executive director of School Improvement and Accountability.

Teachers who are new to Moorhead Area Public Schools and have less than five years of classroom experience are being paired with a mentor who is a seasoned educator. Exceptions may be made for teachers who have more than five years of experience but find themselves in an unfamiliar teaching position, Eidsness said.

Eidsness noted statistics from across the nation that up to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession after the first five years and that beginning teachers make up a greater percentage of today’s school faculty than at any other time in at least the last 20 years. Mentoring programs are being highlighted as a way to lower teacher turnover, improve teaching practice at an accelerated pace, and increase student achievement, she said.

Moorhead Schools’ new teacher mentorship program is intentionally designed to support new teachers without being evaluative.

“In fact, much effort has been expended to keep the process, as well as information shared between the mentors and mentees, separate from building administrators,” Eidsness said.

Some of the goals and activities of Moorhead’s mentorship program include building relationships between the mentors and the mentees through ongoing communication, networking with other new teachers, utilizing the Danielson Framework for Teaching to discuss elements of effective practice, conducting two classroom observation-feedback cycles for each new teacher, visiting strategically selected model classrooms, and holding regularly scheduled large group seminars. This year these seminars will focus on classroom management, Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), higher order thinking, and work-life balance. All Moorhead staff members are invited to attend these large group trainings.

According to Sue Knorr, who is one of the three mentors, the first few years of teaching are very intense and involve a huge learning curve.

“The mentorship program provides new teachers with an experienced, trusted educator who can observe them without evaluation, ask questions to provoke deeper thinking about their choices, take them on guided visits to classrooms of veteran teachers and be an immediate resource to help them be more effective teachers quicker,” Knorr said. “It’s a win-win situation: the more effective the teacher, the more learning that occurs for students, and the more confident the teacher feels to continue in the profession.”

The mentorship program will continue to evolve during the school year as the planning team gathers information and assesses the process, Eidsness said.