This presentation will provide a model for developing an effective mentoring program for beginning teachers of mathematics and science. Two Montana mentoring programs will be described, including one for K-12 teachers and another for university faculty. Both programs are designed to provide early career support in the area of teaching and learning for faculty during their first 4 years of teaching, and both involve pairing beginning teachers with experienced mentors for at least two years. The programs also aim to provide early career instructors not only with survival skills, leading eventually to tenure in a school district or university system, but also to nurture a reflective, investigative and collaborative approach to teaching. In other words, both programs seek to create faculty who will seek career-long learning about teaching. There the similarities end.

The K-12 program serves teachers scattered in small communities across a large, rural state, and uses a conferencing system on the Internet for communication between mentors and beginning teachers, in pairs and small groups. The university mentoring program brings beginning faculty and their mentors together almost weekly for face-to-face seminars, workshops and sharing sessions. Both programs provide standards-based models for instruction and assessment, but the K-12 program also emphasizes science and mathematics content. The design and scope of each mentoring program will be presented, along with information gathered through a cluster of evaluation techniques. These include interviews with the early career faculty themselves, and with their students, mentors and administrators; and observations of the new faculty in their K-12 and college classrooms.

During the first few years in the field, new instructors often establish career-long beliefs about teaching and learning, and classroom practices. The evaluation data from these two Montana programs suggests that early career support can make a positive difference in teacher retention and career satisfaction; knowledge about teaching, learning and content; confidence and competence in implementing standards-based instruction; and feelings of connection with other educators. Finally, compared to their counterparts, new faculty enrolled in such programs have both a higher level of commitment to continuously improving student learning, and more varied and fully developed ideas about where to begin.