A big thank you to all the all the HR professionals who responded to our survey! We wanted to learn more about where district staff were focusing their time around the student teacher placement process and we heard from leaders at nearly 30 districts (large and small) across 6 states.

We learned that every program had staff who spent time communicating with principals to cultivate a pool of qualified mentors. This is great, because in most cases, principals are best positioned to identify which teachers are ready and available for the important role of hosting a student teacher.

Qualified mentors are critical to a student teacher’s experiential learning, but another important piece is making a good match between a student teacher and a host as opposed to just finding them a licensure-aligned placement. We learned that less than 20% of districts spent time collecting, reviewing, and using information about student teachers and mentors in order to make matches. This is understandable because collecting consistent information that can be used effectively in an equitable process is logistically challenging, particularly for institutions managing many placements.

Beyond having enough qualified, licensure-aligned mentors in your pool (ideally more than you need), what else is required for making good matches?

• Information about what student teachers are looking for and have to offer

• Information about what school sites and mentor teachers are looking for and have to offer

• A theory of action or strategy for making matches aligned with program and pipeline objectives

We built Torace to support this work from practicum placements to student teaching to other mentoring and experiential learning—Torace can help bring stakeholder voices into the process in productive ways that promote pipeline sustainability.

If you’d like to learn more about our research or about our platform, schedule a short call with us!

Check out the infographic based on the survey data below. To download the PDF, click here.

To save the infographic as an image, right-click the image below and save!