Search results for: Teacher retention

Over 60 Jewish day school heads, teachers, board members and other educational leaders gathered at Brandeis recently to learn how to make schools places that support career-long learning for teachers. The gathering, convened by the Mandel Center, presented the Center’s latest research about what keeps teachers—from novices to the most experienced—learning, growing and improving.

The quality of a school depends on the quality of its teachers. Finding promising teachers is an ongoing challenge for many school leaders, and keeping them is even more challenging. New teachers leave Jewish day schools at alarming rates, creating what has been called a 'revolving door' of educators. The Induction Partnership Project at the Mandel Center and the New Teacher Center's Jewish New Teacher Project have published a joint position paper in which they offer an image of the kind of new teacher induction that transforms the educational experiences of teachers and their students by establishing a professional, motivated, effective faculty.

Effective school-based induction for new teachers involves much more than mentoring; it requires a comprehensive array of supports buttressed by a collaborative professional culture. Yet few schools are able to offer such a nourishing environment to their new hires. What would it take to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal? In 2005, a team of researchers and practitioners launched a three-year project with two goals: a) to help the leaders of four Jewish day schools create comprehensive systems of induction for their new teachers and b) to carefully document the process. This paper presents the theory behind their work, their strategies for effecting change and lessons learned along the way.