Exploring Mentoring Practices Contributing to New Teacher Retention: An Analysis of the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study

Abstract

How to best support new teachers through the beginning years of their careers and thus to increase new teacher retention is an important question. To explore the predictor variables for new teacher retention from the perspective of effective teacher mentoring practices, multinomial logistic regression was applied in the secondary analysis of the restricted-use data of the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS). The analysis identified both predictive and non-predictive mentoring practices for new teacher retention, which provides important insight for school leaders and policy-makers in regards to designing effective induction programmes to better increase new teacher retention.

Keywords

• teacher mentoring
• teacher retention
• new teacher induction
• teacher turnover
• large scale dataset