In the world of education new state and federal guidelines are typically met with large helpings of skepticism, resistance, and resentment. This has been the case with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, and a majority of other policy roll outs in recent years. With this pattern in mind, I was understandably wary when the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) announced new state standards for mentoring and induction that will go live for the 2015-16 school year.

The new guidelines were finalized in April and now that I’ve had a chance to review them in detail, I’m happy to say that I’m excited for the potential impacts. DESE put together a strong set of program guidelines that move Massachusetts closer to standards of best practice that the New Teacher Center supports, without creating an unreasonable financial burden for school districts. The new guidelines primarily improve alignment to educator evaluation standards, increase support for mentors and beginning educators, and require districts to report their program details to DESE. Within each of these categories are meaningful program minimums that still allow for substantial local control when it comes to program specifics. This has the potential to ensure a broad and substantial level of beginning educator support without being overly restrictive.

Improved Alignment to Evaluation Standards:

The previous mentoring and induction guidelines were created before Massachusetts’ switch to new methods of evaluating teachers and the revised mentoring standards bring mentoring in line with evaluation. There are numerous changes in the 2015 guidelines that make explicit connections to the new evaluation standards, improving clarity all around. These alignments focus on the role of mentoring in educator preparation, evaluation, and ongoing professional development.

For educator preparation the guidelines define the relationship between a student teacher and their supervising practitioner to be similar to mentor/mentee relationship. This sets some implicit (and explicit) guidelines for the kind of support a student teacher should expect from their supervising practitioner. This is helpful because at the moment the support a student teacher receives is dependent on their paired practitioner and the guidelines established by their specific teacher preparation program, leading to very different results from person to person. The new mentoring guidelines also establish protocols for performance assessments for pre-service teachers based on the standards they will experience in their first years of teaching. This is an important step to increasing the reliability and validity of pre-service assessments and districts hiring beginning teachers should not have a clearer picture of their incoming staff.

In terms of evaluation and professional development, the new mentoring guidelines make a brief, but important mention that a teacher’s professional development should be linked to areas identified in their evaluation. Additionally the guidelines define mentoring as a form of ongoing professional development thereby creating a formal link between mentoring and goals for improving an educator’s effectiveness. This is a powerful statement that was missing from previous versions of the guidelines and it should serve to further validate the mentor’s work.

Increased Support for Mentors and Educators:

The biggest change here for districts are the requirements that mentors receive ongoing training and support for mentoring as well as a requirement that both new educators and mentors receive release time in order to conduct observations and other core mentoring work.

The requirement for ongoing training and support for mentors is crucial. I know that in my own experience as a mentor I needed to develop a very new skillset for working with adults. Many of my teaching skills carried over to mentoring, but there are unique skills and competencies that one needs to work with adults in a mentoring capacity. I remember a time when describing my work as a mentor and a colleague said, “that sounds great, you just tell people what to do all day!” That could not be further from the truth. I would have been a terrible mentor with that attitude. A strong mentor needs to be seen as a collaborative partner in the beginning teacher’s development. Since the mentor holds no evaluative authority, the work must be done with both parties’ consent. The mentor does not have the same authority with their beginning teacher as a teacher does with their students. Therefore a mentor needs to cultivate a new mindset for how to approach their work. This takes dedicated time and practice. It is encouraging to see the guidelines recognize this need.

The release time for both parties is equally critical. One of the most powerful ways for a mentor to support a new teacher is through observing the teacher’s practice and debriefing the experience. This cannot be accomplished when the mentor works full time in another capacity. The mentoring will always take a back seat to the mentor’s primary job. Additionally it is critical to a new teacher’s development that they are able to observe other teachers and broaden their set of experiences. Both of these activities require that the mentoring experience be given dedicated time. The mentor must have the flexibility to work with a teacher’s highly restrictive schedule and the new teacher needs time to put aside other priorities and focus on their own development. Without that sacred time the work will always be supplanted by other responsibilities like teaching, lesson planning, or grading.

It is important to note that while the new mentoring guidelines specify release time, they do not specify the nature or amount of that time. This is a key area where districts could invest heavily in their mentoring programs to ensure robust support for their beginning educators. A superficial amount of release time could technically fulfill the requirement without significantly improving the level of support a mentor or educator receives. I am hopeful that districts see this as an opportunity to make meaningful improvements to their mentoring programs.

Mandated Reporting:

In reality the component for mandatory reporting is quite small. The report itself is fairly superficial and only asks districts to submit basic statistics on their programs such as the number of teachers served, the number of mentors, who receives mentoring, and similar numerical or yes/no data. The reporting is interesting, however, when situated in the New Teacher Center’s model for evaluating a mentoring program’s impact. The data that DESE is asking for now fall squarely in the “Counting” category but those data provide the foundation for accessing the more detailed information on program quality and teacher retention in the future. I hypothesize that after a few years of requiring this counting data, DESE will expand their reporting requirements to include measures of program quality and teacher retention. This is a very positive change from the current situation where no reporting is required and districts typically do not evaluate their mentoring and induction programs.

DESE also added a bit of accountability to the reporting by providing the option for DESE to delay review for a district’s Title II Part A application until DESE receives the district’s mentoring report. This is a strong sign of support for the value of mentoring. Title II Part A typically represents a large portion of a district’s funding for professional learning and improvements in teacher quality. In Washington State, my mentor department was funded largely by Title II Part A funds. These funds are generally critical to a district’s professional development plan, and by linking them to the mentoring report, DESE is further strengthening the link between mentoring and professional development. This may be a bit of a rude awakening for some districts that are not in the habit of collecting these data, but the report is by no means onerous and the data should be fairly straightforward to collect.

Analysis:

I see these new guidelines as overwhelmingly positive for improving support to beginning teachers. Some of the changes are small, however, the guidelines move Massachusetts closer to the New Teacher Center’s standards for high quality induction and they show a thoughtful approach by allowing for a large degree of local discretion.

Personally I wish the guidelines went even further to require more robust new teacher support, but I respect that many districts may not be able to financially implement the kinds of changes it would take to hire and support full time mentors in their district. The current guidelines strike a reasonable balance while moving the program minimums in the proper direction. This is an encouraging move from DESE and perhaps in a few years DESE will be in a position to move the guidelines even closer to the New Teacher Center Standards.

I hope that with these new guidelines requiring mentor training, release time, and annual reporting, that districts will find ways to invest more heavily in their mentoring programs. The guidelines bring Massachusetts quite close to the New Teacher Center’s model of full-time mentors with a 1:15 mentor:mentee ratio and this seems like an excellent opportunity to make the additional investments to get there in full. Many districts will already be making significant investment to bring their programs in line with the new guidelines and with a little more investment they could offer a truly robust level of support for their beginning educators. Hopefully these new mentoring and induction guidelines will also lead to greater new teacher quality and retention across the state.