Mentoring is a powerful way to build the capacity of new teachers. High-quality mentoring improves new teacher retention, student achievement, and veteran teachers’ leadership. A significant body of research describes the impact of effective mentoring on beginning teachers’ sense of efficacy, professional growth, and retention rates, as well as the development of skills in key areas of instruction and classroom management.   

To meet the urgent need for districts to provide, ongoing, job-embedded support for beginning teachers Learning Forward is offering a Virtual Mentor Teacher Academy for individual mentors or districts seeking to provide new teachers with an experienced, knowledgeable mentor. The program is for skilled teachers who are ready to mentor colleagues in their first three years in the classroom by applying a mentoring framework to support beginning teachers in growing their practice. The Academy is grounded in the Standards for Professional Learning and adult learning theory, and is designed around a Mentoring Cycle of diagnosing beginning teacher needs, providing coaching support to address those needs, and monitoring progress to measure growth.