Cross-race mentoring within the induction year of new teachers in an independent school

Abstract

New teachers arrive to our nation's schools with a range of educational preparation and professional experience. Schools endeavor to alleviate these differences, build professional capacity, and guarantee the efficacy of new teachers (thus more quickly improving educational quality for children) most frequently through induction programs. Researchers identify mentoring as the most common means of inducting new teachers. The school reform movement and related law have influenced mentoring frequency, goals, and practices, as have recent advances in understanding how adults learn. With the number of new teachers expected in both public and independent schools within the current decade, the intense pressure of reform mandates, and public expectations on teacher quality, the effectiveness of new teacher induction and mentoring programs is paramount. Likewise, as the nation increases in its overall diversity, how mentoring programs address the race and ethnicity of new teachers and mentors, particularly when the vast majority of veteran mentor teachers for the near future will be White, is also critical to program success. This study examined the effect of a newly implemented induction and mentoring program on a cohort of new teachers during their first year of service in an independent school. The school had a strategic initiative to diversify its faculty. Consequently, an essential element of the study was to investigate the experience of new teachers of color who were involved in cross-race mentor-new teacher relationships in contrast to the experience of their White counterparts involved in the same program for the same academic year. An overview of the study, a review of relevant literature, the study's design, results, and discussion of findings and their implications are presented.