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When my mentor teacher, Marie Gironda, passed away earlier this year, hundreds of her former students filled the room to honor her. They came from across generations, many now professionals, parents and community leaders, each carrying a version of the same story: Marie changed my life.
She taught for more than 40 years in the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, one of the lowest-income communities in the country. Her students regularly achieved high Advanced Placement scores and earned admission to some of the nation’s most selective colleges.
But those outcomes don’t fully capture her impact. Marie built a classroom grounded in intellectual rigor, cultural relevance and deep human connection. It was a place where students felt seen, challenged and capable. It was also where I learned how to teach.
As a young inexperienced student teacher, I entered her classroom full of conviction for teaching as a political act, but little understanding about what it would take to create learning opportunities that mattered. I was trying to figure out how to connect with students whose lived experiences differed from my own, how to teach in ways that were both rigorous and relevant, and how to confront my own assumptions about race, curriculum and schooling.
Marie didn’t hand me any simple answers. She coached me, pushed my thinking, challenged my decisions and stayed in the work with me long after my formal placement in her classroom ended. What began as a student-teaching experience became a decades-long professional partnership that shaped my career.
Today, as a teacher educator and policy advocate, I have come to understand something that should be obvious but is rarely treated as such: Mentor teachers like Marie are not just “helping out.” They are doing some of the most important work in our education system. And we are almost entirely failing to support them.
Across the country, mentor teachers are the backbone of how we prepare new educators. They model instruction, provide feedback, guide reflection and help novice teachers navigate the realities of the classroom. Research consistently shows that high-quality mentoring improves teacher effectiveness, job satisfaction and retention, especially in the first three years when teachers are most likely to leave the profession.
Yet mentoring is too often treated as an informal add-on rather than essential to recruiting and retaining new teachers. Mentors are frequently selected based on availability, not expertise. Many receive little to no training in how to coach adult learners. Compensation is inconsistent at best or nonexistent at worst. And the time required to mentor effectively, often hundreds of hours, is layered on top of already demanding teaching loads. The result is a system built on goodwill instead of deliberately designed to support and sustain educators in this role.
Millions of research dollars have been spent studying the teacher pipeline, how to recruit more candidates into the profession, and how to retain teachers serving in our highest needs urban and rural schools. But schools spend far less time and resources addressing what happens once student-teachers get there. And mentor teachers are the missing link.
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If schools are serious about strengthening the educator workforce, they need to treat mentoring as what it is: a form of adult education that requires skill, preparation and sustained investment. The best classroom teachers are not automatically the best mentors. Coaching new teachers, many of whom are young adults or career changers. requires expertise in facilitation, feedback and developmental support.
So, what would it look like to take mentor teaching seriously?
At the local level, school districts must create the conditions for mentoring to succeed. That means providing reduced teaching loads or dedicated time for mentor teachers to observe, coach and confer with new educators. It means selecting mentors based on demonstrated instructional expertise and relational capacity, not just availability. And it means integrating mentoring into the culture of schools, rather than treating it as a compliance requirement tied to credentialing.
At the state level, policymakers should establish clear standards for mentor teacher preparation and provide dedicated funding for stipends and professional learning. States can also require data collection on mentor participation, teacher retention and outcomes, ensuring that investments are tied to measurable impact. Without statewide expectations and funding, access to high-quality mentoring will continue to depend on local resources, exacerbating inequities between districts.
At the federal level, lawmakers should expand investments in teacher residency programs and other clinically rich preparation models that prioritize sustained, high-quality mentorship. Federal funding streams, such as Title II, should be leveraged to support mentor teacher development as a core component of teacher preparation and retention strategies nationwide.
When I think about Marie Gironda, I don’t just think about the mentor who shaped me. I think about the thousands of students she taught and the many educators she mentored — people whose lives and careers were influenced by her commitment to their learning. I also think about how rare it is to find someone like her in many schools, not because educators lack dedication, but because the conditions that sustain this kind of work are increasingly difficult to maintain.
We cannot build a strong, stable teacher workforce on exceptional individuals alone. If we want more teachers to stay, more students to thrive and more communities to benefit from excellent schools, we must invest in the people who teach teachers. We must invest in mentor teachers.
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