Examining the Mentoring Experiences of First-Year Teachers in Missouri
By: R. Marc Brodersen, Hanley Chiang, Jane Li, Kathryn Coleman, Gary Ritter, Collin Hitt, and Jennifer Weston-Sementelli
Mentoring of early-career teachers is a key strategy used by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MO DESE) to improve teacher retention. To that end, MO DESE needs better information on the features of mentoring that early-career teachers receive and the features that may be related to teacher retention. At the request of MO DESE, the Regional Educational Laboratory Central conducted a study of the frequency, duration, activities, and topics addressed in the mentoring received by first-year teachers in Missouri who registered for state-delivered teacher induction workshops in the 2022/23 school year. The study also sought to identify which mentoring features were related to teachers’ likelihood of returning to teach in the same school district for a second year, as measured by teacher employment records.
Most first-year teachers (56 percent) met with their mentors briefly multiple times a month. However, teachers differed in the amount of time spent with mentors on specific mentoring activities. For example, some teachers (21 percent) reported never having been observed by their mentors, although others (25 percent) reported being observed for an hour or more a month. Likewise, the number of topics on which teachers reported having received a moderate amount or a lot of guidance during the mentoring varied, with about a third of teachers reporting receiving guidance on 0–3 topics and another third receiving guidance on all 10 topics MO DESE identifies as important. Among the 10 topics, first-year teachers in the study most frequently reported receiving guidance on noninstructional topics (sharing encouragement or moral support, handling administrative or logistical issues, and managing classroom routines and student behavior) rather than on topics related to delivering content to students or instructional planning. The mentoring teachers experienced did not vary significantly across districts with different characteristics. Additionally, none of the mentoring features examined had clear statistically significant relationships with teacher retention.
Please Cite As: Brodersen, R. M., Chiang, H., Coleman, K., Hitt, C., Li, J., Ritter, G., & Weston- Sementelli, J. (2025). Examining the mentoring experiences of first- year teachers in Missouri (REL 2025–014). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/use- work/resource- library/reports.