Technological solutions to streamline matching

Research suggests that the most important element of clinical practice is whether the cooperating teacher is themself an effective instructor.¹ However, identifying those effective instructors who are willing to become cooperating teachers, and then matching them with student teachers in the same certification areas, can become logistically complicated, especially in larger districts or in those partnering with many prep programs. Several places have found technological solutions to streamline the process, reducing the need for staff time to coordinate placements and improving the quality of the student teacher–cooperating teacher matches.

Spokane Public Schools 

The district worked with researchers from the University of Washington to build the Student Teaching Portal. This system invites prep programs to create student teacher profiles for all candidates, recruits cooperating teachers who have met the district’s eligibility requirements (including evaluation ratings), invites principals to approve cooperating teachers in the portal, and then makes all this information available to the district’s Human Resources Director to make initial matches. These matches must then be approved by all involved parties. The HR director estimates that while student teaching placements took about 50% of his predecessor’s job and about half of an HR assistant’s time over the year, an estimated investment of hundreds of hours of time, the process now requires only about 30 hours of work, in total, twice a year, plus about an hour or two a week.

• Read more in the Spokane Public Schools case study 

Tennessee 

In 2013, Tennessee’s state education agency began a partnership with researchers from the Improving Student Teaching Initiative (ISTI), led by Dan Goldhaber and Matt Ronfeldt, to explore and strengthen the quality of clinical practice in the state. The ISTI project sought to determine if there were strategies that could be implemented locally and then statewide to improve student teaching placements.

The Mentors Matter project worked with the SEA to gather relevant teacher data (including observation ratings, value-added measures when available, and years of experience). Districts were randomly assigned to either receive this “promising placement” list or not. Several studies (linked below) on this intervention found that providing districts with the recommended cooperating teachers resulted in more effective and experienced teachers being recruited to serve as cooperating teachers (referred to in Tennessee as clinical mentors), and candidates in these districts were more instructionally effective and felt better prepared. Unfortunately, the project was ultimately put on hold. While the researchers were able to deliver the algorithm to Tennessee to be used statewide, the state has not put it into use in subsequent years. However, the prep program and local education agency co-selection of cooperating teachers is still a priority: prep program reviews and in primary partnership agreements both must include this element.

The project identified ways to overcome several challenges:

• Observation ratings tend to be lower for teachers of color or for teachers working in classrooms with underrepresented groups (e.g., students of color, more special education students, students with lower academic outcomes), which could result in an algorithm that places a higher value on placements with white cooperating teachers and more privileged students. The researchers adjusted the algorithm for class composition and teacher demographics, and were able to maintain meaningful differences between the control group and the “recommended” group in terms of teacher quality, without differences in mentor or class demographic composition.
• Protecting teacher privacy is important. The researchers and state ultimately included both measures of teacher quality (value-added measures and observations) alongside experience, meaning that a teacher with a high score could have excelled in any of those areas. To date they have only shared data back with districts, who already have access to teacher data. Sharing the list with prep programs may be more feasible if the information is distilled further (e.g., by simply giving teachers a checkmark if they are recommended to be a cooperating teacher).

• Read more about the Mentors Matter project in Tennessee:
  • Ronfeldt, M., Bardelli, E., Truwit, M., Mullman, H., Schaaf, K., & Baker, J. C. (2020). Improving preservice teachers’ feelings of preparedness to teach through recruitment of instructionally effective and experienced cooperating teachers: A randomized experiment. 
  • Ronfeldt, M., Bardelli, E., Truwit, M., Schaaf, K., & Baker, J. (2023). Mentors Matter recruitment replication & extension: Investigating effects across implementation years.