Your New Teachers Are Two Months In. Is Your Teacher Mentoring Program Working?

Your new teachers are about two months into the school year now — past the honeymoon stretch and into the part of the calendar where a mentor pairing either becomes a real working relationship or turns into an compliance checkbox. If you haven’t checked in on how those pairings are really going at this point in the year, this is the time: before mid-semester PD planning locks in targeted trainings or peer coaching for November and December.

Dana Larson and Marguerite Dimgba have spent a combined four-plus decades putting together effective teacher mentoring programs. Larson is Director of Professional Development at South Washington County Schools in Minnesota, the sixth-largest district in the state. Dimgba is Director of Professional Learning and mentor coordinator at Greece Central School District in upstate New York, the ninth largest in hers. Neither of their mentor programs looks the way it did when it started, and both leaders are candid about what they tried and abandoned along the way. Here’s what they’ve learned.

The data behind the urgency

Frontline’s 2026 K-12 Lens survey, now in its third year, polled over 1,000 district leaders nationwide. Mentorship ranked second among all retention strategies districts reported, trailing only professional learning communities, and it was also the second most common area where districts said they’re increasing investment. Districts that put more into mentoring reported a roughly four-point boost in retention compared to those that didn’t.

That tracks with what Larson and Dimgba have seen on the ground for years. But the more useful question is what separates a mentor program that moves the needle from one that’s mentorship in name only. Both leaders point to the same few things:

• Clear criteria for who becomes a mentor — not just tenure or popularity 
• Real training, delivered in a way mentors will actually complete 
• A mechanism for asking “is this working?” and the willingness to change the answer 

Should your best teacher be your mentor? Not necessarily 

Being great with eight-year-olds and being great at coaching a 28-year-old colleague through a rough first semester are different skills and is the kind of thing that can lead to a mentor program underperforming, even though it looks good on paper.

“I think that is something that can be inadvertently decided,” Larson said. “This teacher is amazing, the kids love them, and they really actually aren’t interested in supporting the learning of an adult.”

South Washington County now works from a one-page document listing the characteristics of a strong mentor: 

• A growth mindset
• Flexibility and openness to learning
• Genuine interest in supporting adult learners — not just a long tenure or a strong classroom reputation

Greece Central applies a similar filter, but through a different mechanism, since its mentor roles are posted, competitive positions rather than assignments. Dimgba runs a gap analysis each year, looking at which certification areas have the most new hires — a heavy year of special-ed hires, say, or a run of speech-language pathologist openings — and recruits mentors specifically for those gaps rather than filling on a first-come, first-served basis.

South Washington County also asks applicants why they want to mentor at this point in their career, and what they’d consider their “superpowers” in the classroom. This gets at motivation and self-awareness at the same time, and it gives program coordinators something concrete to work from when pairing mentors and mentees together.

How does mentor-mentee matching happen?

Perfect matches are the goal, but both leaders agree they’re not always possible. So what do you prioritize when they’re not?

South Washington County’s priority order is the licensure area first, then physical proximity. A special education teacher or a related-services provider (an OT, a PT, a school nurse) benefits enormously from a mentor who has worked in the exact same role, because those positions carry logistics and language that a general classroom mentor simply doesn’t have. For staff outside those higher-need areas, being in the same building matters more in practice, making quick check-ins possible before school or during a shared prep period.

Greece Central approaches it differently, and Dimgba acknowledges that the field itself is somewhat split on the right answer. “I’ve been to a number of conferences — Learning Forward stands out — where we talk about coaching and mentoring, and other districts, there’s sort of two camps,” she said. “‘It has to be the same certification.’ ‘Well, not necessarily.’” Her district leans toward the second camp: a coaching mindset matters more than matching content areas, because a mismatched certification often means the mentor can’t simply give the right answers and has to ask better questions instead — which, it turns out, is usually the more valuable skill anyway. Where her team does prioritize matching is proximity, and increasingly, whether the new teacher is coming from another district and needs someone who can translate “how things are done here.”

What didn’t work, and what replaced it 

Greece Central started with 25 full-time-release curriculum mentors. The funding wasn’t sustainable, so the district shifted first to a system of individual payroll vouchers for every mentoring hour — which generated so much paperwork it collapsed under its own weight. Eventually, they landed on a stipend model for current classroom teachers, supplemented by recent retirees (those out fewer than five years) hired back specifically to fill mentoring gaps. Dimgba’s advice to districts just starting out: “One size doesn’t fit all. I’d like to find out how other districts and states organize their mentor programs and take the best parts to modify our program… develop something organic that meets the best needs of the teachers that are in your district.” 

South Washington County’s early misstep was structural rather than financial. In the early days, the district recruited volunteers and lead teachers without clearly defining what a good mentor looked like or what outcomes the program was after. Larson’s team used surveys to help answer those questions and eventually set formal criteria — but her broader point is about posture: “Be vulnerable enough to ask the questions and be humble enough to take some action if things aren’t working.” 

Both districts also converged independently on Cognitive Coaching as a turning point. Rather than mentors handing new teachers answers, Cognitive Coaching trains mentors to ask better questions and put the “cognitive lift” on the educator being mentored. Larson described a measurable shift in feedback quality after her mentors adopted the approach. New teachers reported being pushed to think deeply and simultaneously felt more supported, not less. 

The confidentiality firewall 

One of the more concrete, replicable ideas here is what Larson calls “the firewall”: a hard boundary between mentoring and formal evaluation. Mentors in both districts are explicitly non-evaluative. They don’t report back to administrators about what a new teacher struggled with, and administrators are trained not to treat mentor conversations as a backdoor into performance data. 

“I tell the mentors, you don’t have to have all of the answers — that’s not your role,” Larson said. “How can you help them get the resources and support they need?” Dimgba’s district enforces the same separation: new teachers submit a mentor log confirming that sessions occurred, and the mentor signs off, but neither party reports on content. The accountability check is “Did the required hours happen?” rather than “What was discussed?” That lets new teachers be honest with their mentors about what they don’t know yet. 

Conquering the time barrier

One key blocker to mentorship progress is often not leadership buy-in or a shortage of willing mentors, but the time for meaningful connection and building effective mentor training. A district that decides to invest in mentoring may quickly face logistical challenges. 

Both leaders offered concrete, low-cost tactics: 

• Staggered building start times. If one elementary school starts at 8 a.m. and another at 9, a mentor and mentee in different buildings can use that hour-long gap to observe each other’s classrooms without either missing instructional time. 
• Shadow days with substitute coverage. A mentor covers a class while the new teacher observes elsewhere, or vice versa. 
• Counting joint professional learning as mentoring time. If a mentor and mentee attend a session together and debrief afterward, that counts, with no separate meeting required. 
• Asynchronous, self-paced mentor training. Both districts moved training out of single mandatory in-person days and into their learning management systems. That’s not because asynchronous is inherently better, but it helps them reach every mentor, even when packed summer calendars make a single training day unfeasible for every single person to attend. 

Dimgba’s broader point on flexibility: “It doesn’t have to be a more traditional type of mentoring. What else might it look like?” 

Making the case when funding is uncertain 

One of the harder parts of running a mentoring program at scale is funding volatility, something districts often discount until it becomes urgent. South Washington County’s program has run on Minnesota’s Q Comp funding since 2005, but Larson is clear that the program’s durability is less about money than it is that the district has spent two decades building data and a public case for the work. Even if the funding disappeared, the argument for keeping the program wouldn’t have to be built from scratch. 

Both districts log mentoring hours, observations, and interactions through Frontline Professional Growth, which gives them a clean data trail. This helps them with school board presentations, community communication, and recruitment materials that make teacher mentoring part of how they attract educators in the first place. South Washington County markets its induction and mentoring program directly at recruiting events, using a flyer that highlights the Probationary Academy, mentorship, and peer coaching to attract new hires. 

Common questions

The throughline 

Although the two districts differ in funding source and program structure, their approaches incorporate the same few ideas: 

• Define what a good mentor looks like instead of assuming it correlates with classroom talent 
• Protect the psychological safety of the mentoring relationship by keeping it separate from evaluation 
• Treat feedback as a design input, not a formality 
• Be honest — publicly, to your own team, and eventually to your school board — when something isn’t working. 

Neither program arrived at its current form on the first try, and neither leader treats that as a failure. It’s just what building something that last for decades (through budget cycles, leadership turnover, and changing research) looks like. 

If a pairing in your building isn’t working, this is the moment to catch it. Evaluate mid-semester PD needs now and arrange a targeted training or peer coaching session before winter break, not after report cards get sent home in January.