Beginning Teachers to Receive E-Mail Mentoring Through New MSU Grant

Chris Ottey has prepared hundreds of lesson plans, but he still remembers what it was like to be a new teacher and receive encouragement from a more experienced teacher. Judy Sander lived some 300 miles away, but they e-mailed each other several times a week, shrinking the distance between them and fostering the careers of both.

By Evelyn Boswell, MSU Research Office

"I felt it helped me identify strategies and ways to solve different problems I was having in my classroom and share the successes, too, with someone in a common situation or common grade level," Ottey said recently from Sacajawea Middle School in Bozeman where he now teaches sixth grade math and science.

Sander, a fourth grade teacher in the East Evergreen School District near Kalispell, said, "It’s the idea of being able to talk about teaching itself, rather than talk about problems or kids. It’s the actual teaching. ‛How do you do this? How do you do that?’"

Sander and Ottey were paired for a year through a formal mentoring program that Montana State University-Bozeman started in 1993. That program will end in January, but MSU recently received $3 million to help set up a new e-mail mentoring program for beginning science and math teachers. The five-year grant was part of a $7.5-million grant the National Science Foundation gave the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). The goal is to build skills and encourage new teachers to stay in the profession.

"Research shows that student test scores are highest when a teacher has at least seven years of classroom experience," said Elisabeth Swanson, director of the Science Math Resource Center at MSU and head of the mentoring project. "If we are successful, our second- through fourth-year teachers – their students will look more like the students of those more veteran teachers."

It used to be common for teachers to stay in the field for 20 to 30 years, but not any more, Swanson added. Studies have shown that 40 percent of the beginning teachers nationwide leave the profession in the first five years.

"We need to help them be as effective as possible during their teaching career – whether it be three years or 20 years," Swanson said.

"E-Mentoring for Student Success" will match 50 beginning teachers a year with approximately the same number of mentors. All the teachers will be science and math teachers in middle schools and high schools. The beginning teachers will mainly work at rural or reservation schools in Montana, but also in Great Falls, Billings and Missoula. The mentors may teach in urban or rural schools.

"We’re really excited they got that grant," said Erik Burke, director of public policy for the Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers.

Burke tried unsuccessfully to persuade the last two Montana Legislatures to pass a teacher mentoring bill. Mentoring is significant, he said, because it can help rural areas retain teachers. It can also help teachers build their careers.

Ottey, now in his ninth year of teaching, said, "As teachers, we get pretty busy and sometimes don’t make a lot of time to share information with each other. That’s where we get some of our ideas – from each other. Any sort of mentoring program can be really effective."

Swanson’s partners in the project are the NSTA, the Burns Telecommunications Center at MSU, the NSF Center for Learning and Teaching in the West, and the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Evelyn Boswell, (406) 994-5135 or [email protected]

http://www.montana.edu/commserv/csnews/nwview.php?article=635