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Victoria University of Wellington academic Kate Thornton will explore the role of mentoring in supporting new teachers and developing education leadership at an American non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of teacher and school leader effectiveness. As recipient of the 2012 Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award in Education Research, Kate will spend three months from August 2012 at the New Teacher Center in Santa Barbara, California, observing the Center’s teacher induction and school leadership development programmes. The use of mentoring to support teacher leadership is well established and the subject of considerable research in the United States, and the New Teacher Center has served nearly 50,000 teachers and 5,000 mentors since its establishment in 1998. By observing the Center’s programmes and interviewing both mentor and teacher participants, Kate hopes to identify factors for the training and support of effective teacher mentors that could be applied in the New Zealand education sector, where an ability to show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning is required of all registered teachers.
As well as ultimately improving student learning, mentoring can help attrition rates for new teachers by improving self-reflection, problem-solving, confidence and professional growth. The New Teacher Center’s programmes have achieved long-term new teacher retention rates as high as 95%, compared to a nationwide dropout rate of nearly 50% in the United States. Mentoring relationships are shown to provide similar benefits professionally to mentors as their mentees.
The National President of the New Zealand Educational Administration and Leadership Society (NZEALS), Kate works at the forefront of educational leadership across all sectors from early childhood to tertiary education. She teaches courses on educational leadership and mentoring and coaching at Victoria University’s Faculty of Education, and has worked for many years on mentoring and leadership among early childhood education teachers. Kate will be the fifth Fulbright-Cognition Scholar in Education Research since the award partnership began between Fulbright New Zealand and the Cognition Institute in 2008.
Please download the press release here.
For more information on the Cognition Fulbright Scholarship please click here.
