In 1988, four teachers sat at a kitchen table and questioned how to keep new teachers in the profession. The numbers were grim: 50 percent of new teachers left within five years, and systems discouraged them from continuing on. Beyond retention, they knew that building teacher effectiveness was a big piece of the puzzle too.
In response to the challenges facing novice teachers, a laboratory for developing mentoring strategies evolved. The program was founded by Ellen Moir, then Director of Teacher Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in collaboration with Wendy Baron, Supervisor of Teacher Education at UCSC, and supported by the Chair of the UCSC Teacher Education Program, Eugene Garcia.
The Santa Cruz New Teacher Project’s four-year pilot saw 37 induction programs serve more than 3,000 beginning teachers who were mentored by 2,200 experienced teachers in a cross section of urban, suburban, and rural school districts. An evaluation study showed improvement in both teacher practice and retention.
The California State Legislature approved its Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) Program to invest in new teachers. BTSA set aside state funds to provide mentor support for new teachers to clear their credentials. The Santa Cruz New Teacher Project became one of California’s initial projects jointly administered by the California Department of Education and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
With major support from the Walter S. Johnson and Noyce Foundations, the Santa Cruz New Teacher Project became the New Teacher Center, based at the University of California Santa Cruz. NTC began a quick expansion beyond the greater California Bay Area to bring induction and mentoring services to a broader portfolio of schools.
As NTC’s work became known as a model practice for mentorship, the desire and need for bringing services to a national level grew. Schools, districts, and funders sought out NTC to partner and bring innovative professional learning to their communities. Collaboration and knowledge sharing enabled a period of extensive growth.
A group of 175 thought leaders, policymakers, funders, researchers, and educators came together at UCSC for the first annual Symposium. The event, which focused on supporting new teachers and the role of mentorship, was the first of its kind. Over 22 additional Symposiums have taken place to date, serving more than 15,000 changemakers and educators from all 50 states and multiple countries.
The Goldman Sachs Foundation enabled the NTC teacher induction model, considered the “gold standard” for mentor-based induction programs, to be replicated in rural and urban districts in other states. The national pilot opened up partnerships with districts in Dorchester, MD, New York City, and Charlotte, NC, and outreach and dissemination statewide in Wisconsin.
In collaboration with the National Science Teaching Association and Montana State University, the National Science Foundation awarded NTC a five-year, $7.5 million grant. The initiative supported virtual mentoring networks to provide support to beginning science teachers in middle school and high school.
The Carnegie Foundation and NTC partnered in the Teachers for a New Era program to revitalize and shift teacher pre-service programs across the country. The project provided support for new teachers that extended from college preparation through the first two years in the classroom.
Transitioning from a pilot program of the AVI CHAI Foundation in 2003, NTC’s Jewish New Teacher Project began with a group of Jewish Day Schools in New York City. Adapting NTC’s model to accelerate teacher effectiveness, JNTP’s partnerships across the U.S. have supported more than 1,000 educators to date.
NTC’s programs continued to evolve, bringing years of lessons learned from teacher-focused coaching and mentoring to more educators and in new ways. Meanwhile, NTC’s 15 years of excellence in the field put more and more emphasis on mentorship as an integral piece of the professional development experience.
Building on initial programs to support new administrators, NTC piloted a new training program to support principals as instructional leaders. It enabled the development of action plans for site-level instructional leadership by providing principals and school leaders intensive, contextualized support from a coach or mentor.
Ellen Moir was honored for the work of the New Teacher Center and her leadership in the field of teacher induction and mentoring. The McGraw Prize celebrates innovation, inspiration, and impact in education, with past honorees including former First Lady Barbara Bush, former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., and former U.S. Secretaries of Education Richard Riley and Rod Paige.
CPS, the nation’s third largest school district, launched a human capital management strategy with NTC to take on the deep challenge of improving beginning teacher retention. The 15-year partnership continues today, focusing on sustainable models for coaching, school leadership, and curriculum implementation.
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. selected NTC to be one of two providers of teacher induction program models for the first U.S. Department of Education evaluation of mentor-based induction. The program brought mentor training and beginning teacher seminars to eight large urban school districts over a two-year period.
NTC launched eMSS, a pilot program in nine states, to boost student performance in mathematics by providing an online network for beginning math teachers. Teachers shared case studies, lesson plans, and common challenges, while accessing mathematics content specialists. eMSS served roughly 4,000 teachers over the course of 10 years.
Harvard Education Press published New Teacher Mentoring: Hopes and Promise for Improving Teacher Effectiveness, laying out the principles of high-quality instructional mentoring and providing case studies for a variety of applications and situations in school districts.
Policymakers needed a higher level of awareness of the effectiveness of NTC’s professional learning approach on students. Multiple research studies showed clear results of improvement in classrooms, demonstrating that high-quality support for educators was an excellent return on investment for increased learning.
In partnership with the Joyce Foundation, NTC created comprehensive summaries of induction policies for all 50 states. The review elevated 10 key state policy criteria for comprehensive, high-quality induction that accelerates new teacher effectiveness and improves teacher retention at the state level.
The culmination of a three-year project, the MET Project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a collaboration between NTC, dozens of independent research teams, and nearly 3,000 teacher volunteers from seven U.S. public school districts. The findings provided measures for identifying great teaching as a means for educators to improve their practice and serve as the basis for more targeted professional development.
Funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Starting Smart and Strong Initiative began in three communities across the Bay Area as well as Alum Rock in East San Jose. NTC’s first efforts to promote and sustain high-quality early learning programs revealed a deep need for professional development infrastructure and support for preschool and transitional kindergarten teachers.
A five-year study revealed that students of NTC-supported teachers gained up to five months of additional learning in reading and math. Evaluation partner SRI International shared how the NTC model supports educators in delivering high-quality instruction focused on student needs with big results.
The intersection of professional learning and student equity put NTC at the forefront of pushing a new paradigm. We’re moving from “managing inequity” to a new way forward, one that actively dismantles barriers for over 50 million underserved students and unlocks opportunities without restrictions.
Under the leadership of CEO Desmond Blackburn, NTC wrote a new mission statement: “to disrupt the predictability of educational inequities for systemically underserved students by accelerating educator effectiveness.” The executive team was reformed to comprise entirely people of color, with decades of experience in the work of educational equity and justice.
NTC received a five-year, $7.9 million Education Innovation and Research grant to implement our whole-school professional learning model with three sites across the U.S. Through SEL-anchored instructional support for coaches, teachers, and school leaders, the data-driven approach opens up new pathways to steer instruction practices, improve learning, transform school culture, and retain teachers by meeting systemically underserved students’ needs.
To ensure NTC is serving students experiencing poverty, BIPOC students, multilingual learners, students with learning differences, and immigrant students, we launched a national Education Equity Commission (EEC). The EEC shines a spotlight on the roots of systemic problems, and pushes on NTC’s services and strategies to unlock opportunities for underserved students. Members include field leaders in equity, systems leadership, blended learning, mindset/behavior change, trauma-informed practices, and a student advisory group.
In response to our new mission and expanding focus, we launched a new logo, website, and brand vision for NTC. It serves as a reminder to always put students in the center, and to truly see people and lead with empathy, especially when designing strategies or dismantling broken systems.
The Elephant in the (Class)room is a clear articulation of NTC’s Point of View, a publication that puts forth a new, shared purpose for education. Guided and informed by our Equity Commission, consisting of 23 stakeholders ranging from students to teachers to researchers, The Elephant shares commonsense human-centered ideas we can all get behind rooted in the science of learning and development. Our three essential understandings (“anchors”) offer multiple points of entry for us all to champion as we work to realize transformative, thriving learning experiences for young people.
We believe classrooms are oases of empathy and humanity, centered on every learner’s needs.
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We’re committed to equity for all students, especially those from underserved communities.
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Our professional learning innovations help educators build thriving, equitable schools.
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