As a first-year teacher, Taiesha Woodson-Durham was responsible for the reading proficiency levels of all fifth and sixth graders at John P. Altgeld Elementary in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. During the previous academic year, just 27 percent of her students had met state standards in reading. But despite the challenges she faced, Taiesha set lofty goals of student achievement for her classroom.

As part of her new teacher induction, Taiesha was assigned a mentor from New Teacher Center—Clare Donovan Scane. With Clare, Taiesha analyzed writing samples and other data from all of her 150 students. This helped Taiesha and Clare group students according to needs and create lesson plan objectives to improve student achievement. "Analyzing student data with Clare helped me know when I had to revisit something I’d already gone over in class," Taiesha said. "I would do a mini-lesson with the whole group and give small group instruction to help students master specific skills." In her second year, her mentor helped Taiesha reflect on her classroom management and challenged her to modify her teaching style and increase levels of student engagement.

By the end of her first year of teaching, 66.7 percent of Taiesha's fifth grade students and 69.9 percent of sixth grade students had met state reading standards, up from the previous year's rate of 27 percent. During her second year of teaching, 81.7 percent of Taiesha's sixth-grade students met state reading goals. Taiesha's determination to improve her students' reading, coupled with the ongoing mentoring she received from New Teacher Center, provided her students with skills for a lifetime of learning.

Teacher Effectiveness as the Key for Student Achievement
New Teacher Center is a national organization dedicated to improving student learning by accelerating the effectiveness of new teachers. New Teacher Center believes that the key to improving student achievement is by improving teacher quality. To achieve this, the organization offers educators the support they need to mature in the classroom. "What we have found is that by really intensifying support services for new teachers, we're able to not only accelerate their development, but also retain them in the profession while building the leadership capacity of the district," explains Ellen Moir, founder and Chief Executive Officer of New Teacher Center.

New Teacher Center partners with school districts to implement new teacher induction programs that match new teachers with carefully selected veteran teacher mentors who receive ongoing professional development that includes working with adult learners, addressing issues of equity, differentiating instruction, and implementing professional standards. Mentors work with new teachers for two to three years using a formative assessment toolkit created by New Teacher Center. This toolkit focuses on goal setting, lesson planning, classroom management, and analyzing student work. New Teacher Center also works with administrators and principals to help them transform their schools into vibrant learning communities in which both teachers and students can thrive.

New Teacher Center believes that its goals of improving teacher effectiveness and student achievement, as well as increasing teacher retention and building district leadership, must be approached through a complementary model for systemic change. To create the environment necessary for its induction programs to drive impact, New Teacher Center works to achieve widespread change through policy advocacy in new teacher induction and working conditions at the Federal and state levels, direct work with district and school administrators, and dissemination of New Teacher Center's research on new teacher development practices.

Expanding Partnerships and the Program
Ellen Moir, a first-generation college graduate, founded New Teacher Center in 1998. In the 2009-10 academic school year New Teacher Center is partnering with 200 school districts in 40 states, serving more than 10,000 new teachers. As Ellen leads the organization into its next stage of growth, she is honing New Teacher Center's strategy for measuring success through student achievement rates. In the next two years, New Teacher Center plans to concentrate on expanding its partnerships in large urban districts with disproportionately high representations of inexperienced, under-qualified teachers.