This digest examines the spread of mentoring in the United States, obstacles to realizing the potential of mentoring as a vehicle of reform, needed research, and selected issues of policy and practice. While the education community understands that mentors have a positive effect on teacher retention, the question of what mentors should do, what…

This study describes how the contexts of mentoring shape the perspectives and practices of mentors in the Teacher Trainee Program in Los Angeles (California), an effort to recruit candidates to teach in inner city secondary schools by providing on-the-job training to college graduates, and in the Graduate Intern Program in Albuquerque (New…

The Los Angeles Teacher Trainee program is designed to help recruit talented people into teaching; the Mentor Teacher component of that program is designed to help retain capable teachers by expanding their rewards and opportunities. Requirements of the Teacher Trainee Program intersect with the inducements of the Mentor Teacher Program to form a…

Learning to teach ought to be a major province of inservice rather than of preservice teacher education. A "learning to teach continuum" consists of four phases in a teacher's development. During the pretraining phase, which begins with the first childhood exposure to school, patterns and ideas of teaching are formed, and a model of teaching is…

The Mentor Teacher Program in the state of California is designed to retain capable teachers by expanding their rewards and opportunities. This report focuses on the character and quality of mentoring in an alternate route program sponsored by a large urban school district. A 30-hour required training course for mentors introduces them to their…

This paper looks at issues subsumed by the phrase "learning to teach" that have implications for the design and conduct of teacher education. The first section lays out a temporal perspective by examining the times and places of learning to teach. The second section brings together disparate strands of research on the learners of…