National Board Certification as a Signal of Cooperating Teacher Quality

• In Event: Extending and Interrogating the Quantitative Evidence That Clinical Mentors Matter

Abstract

The past decade has seen an explosion of quantitative research about specific aspects of teacher preparation. Much of this recent research has focused on teacher candidates’ student teaching experiences, which have been recognized as the most important component of an effective teacher training program (NCATE, 2010) and often provide prospective teachers with their first teaching experiences before entering the workforce. Although early quantitative research on student teaching focused primarily on the school and district in which student teaching occurs (e.g., Boyd et al., 2009; Goldhaber et al., 2017; Ronfeldt, 2012, 2015), state policymakers and teacher education programs (TEPs) are increasingly focused on a more specific aspect of a candidate’s student teaching experience: the clinical mentor—referred to as cooperating teachers in Washington State (the setting for this study)—who supervises the candidate’s student teaching assignment.
Emerging research has shown that early-career teachers tend to be more effective when their student teaching placement was supervised by a more effective cooperating teacher (Bastian et al, 2020; Goldhaber et al., 2020; Ronfeldt et al., 2018). Recent experimental evidence has offered some potential mechanisms for these relationships, suggesting that effective mentors improve candidates’ feelings of preparedness (Ronfeldt et al., 2020a) and their instructional skills (Goldhaber et al., 2022). However, it remains unclear how teacher education programs responsible for placing student teachers can directly leverage these results to improve student teaching placements, as many of the cooperating teacher characteristics that predict future outcomes of student teachers—e.g., evaluation ratings or value added to student test scores—are not easily observable to these programs.
In this paper, we supplement this growing literature by testing whether a more easily observable proxy of potential cooperating teacher effectiveness, whether a teacher is National Board Certified, is predictive of future student teacher outcomes. Prior work in Chicago (Ronfeldt et al. 2020b) found small and even negative effects of cooperating teacher National Board Certification on self-perceived preparedness, cooperating teacher-perceived preparedness, and first-year observation ratings. But we are not aware of prior evidence that has connected cooperating teacher National Board Certification to candidates’ future value added to student test scores and retention in the public teacher workforce.
We explore this question using data from teacher education programs in Washington participating in the Teacher Education Learning Collaborative (TELC), a consortium of 15 teacher education programs who have provided historical data on their teacher candidates and student teaching placements. We combine the TELC data with statewide data on students and teachers in Washington—including whether each teacher is National Board Certified—to explore the connections between assignment to a cooperating teacher with National Board Certification and future student and teacher outcomes. Preliminary evidence suggests that National Board Certified teachers are substantially more likely to host student teachers, all else equal, but that this certification is not strongly predictive of the future effectiveness or retention of the student teachers they supervise. This suggests that more detailed proxies of mentor effectiveness may be necessary to improve student teaching placements.

Authors

• Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Krieg, Western Washington University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roddy Theobald, American Institutes for Research
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grace Falken, University of Washington
  Presenting Author