Research about Teacher Retention and Mentoring/Induction

So far what I have found suggests that teachers are more likely to remain in the profession and more likely to remain in the same school and district when they receive high quality, frequent mentoring from a colleague who teaches the same sort of assignment on their campus, whether the mentoring is officially required or informally offered, but all the studies have serious flaws in methodology, data collection, interpretation… In short, a consensus of opinion of any 25 third-year teachers would probably be equally likely to be valid and reliable.

Now my concern is to look a little beyond theoretically well-designed mentoring programs (such as TxBESS) which appear to have helped a little, and consider the somewhat larger and less precisely defined context of what factors weigh most heavily in the minds of teachers in causing them to leave or encouraging them to stay and become leaders and mentors of coming generations of teachers.

Your advice and insights are welcome in this task! I have been preparing teachers, being one, mentoring a few, mentoring a few teacher educators and continuing to learn about teaching for most of the past forty years and hope to continue doing so for another twenty or so. Thus, I have some relevant knowlege and experience, but I have a lot to learn about doing this well in the twenty-first century. This is our profession; we should think and care deeply about how to make it one that builds a better world without using up the primary resource that creates culture, civility and knowledge–the teachers.

Newsletters and Websites for Bilingual/ESL Education Professionals

In addition to giving you access to several of Stephen Krashen’s books and articles, at the top of this webpage, you can subscribe to his mailing list and take heart as you see his frequent postings to newspapers in defense of effective bilingual education and ESL programs and teachers and their efforts to help the world communicate.
http://www.sdkrashen.com

Jim Cummins’ website gives you access to a number of his landmark articles and to research information that can be helpful when you need something in print to help you convince someone of the value of what you are trying to do. On this webpage, on the lower left-hand side in the box of links to other parts of the site, be sure to click on Version 2 under Links-Bilingual Education! It takes you to incredible online resources and discussions from the “crème de la crème” of bilingual and ESL experts!
Although the part of the site entitled Reflective Teaching and the Texas EXCET is out-dated in its references to the EXCET Professional Development test which was revised and became the TExES Pedagogy and Professional Responsibilities (PPR), the observations of the writer of this segment (apparently a Houston ISD teacher) still provide some useful guidance for new teachers and those attempting to understand the philosophy which underlies the Texas teacher certification tests.
http://www.iteachilearn.com

Colorín Colorado! A bilingual site for families and educators of English language learners. Go to this publication of theirs for something you can share with your monolingual colleagues that will make them more aware of the differences between Spanish and English: http://www.colorincolorado.org/educators/background/capitalizing I don’t agree with everything this article says (as a linguist or as a bilingual teacher), but the inaccuracies are minor and it is a useful attempt to explain some contrasts. Be sure to look around their website for items in Spanish that you can share with parents.
http://www.colorincolorado.org

Reading Rockets: “Launching Young Readers”. This site sometimes reflects a point of view that is somewhat more behaviorist and less constructivist than the orientation preferred by many education professionals, but often there are useful practical suggestions for parents and teachers.
http://www.readingrockets.org

LDonline: “The world’s leading website on learning disabilities and ADHD”. They often have brief articles by some of the most cited and sought after authorities, as well as practical advice for teachers and parents.
http://www.ldonline.org

Education Week is such a helpful resource for staying current on important issues in education. When you go to this page, in the upper right-hand corner, be careful to click on Free Newsletters, not trial subscription! I subscribe to all the free newsletters they offer because I have such varied interests in teaching as a profession, but often the same articles are repeated in the different newsletters, so you might be more likely to benefit by choosing one or two options. Keep in mind that this resource provides articles collected from other sources such as newspapers and is probably not what your graduate school professors expect you to cite in research papers. However, the news items you find in EDWEEK publications give you a good idea of where to look for current topics and often provide links to important reports of funded research studies. Often the executive summary or the entire report can be downloaded as a pdf document or you can at least read enough to determine whether you want to spend time and funds to access them.
http://www.edweek.org