Addressing Attrition: Multi-Level Mentorship Model

Abstract

Mentorship has been identified as a protective factor in early career special education teacher retention. These mentorships can be formal or informal during teachers’ first years of teaching and can support teachers in various aspects of their careers, such as navigating required paperwork and instructional practices. However, these mentorships should be individualized and consistently provided to be meaningful. To address the inconsistent mentorships that early career teachers may receive, we propose a model in which early career teachers are supported by a network of alumni to both support and retain the early career special education teaching force. In turn, the alumni are supported by university faculty in mentorship skills to fill gaps in administrative roles where special education expertise is needed. By providing support to both groups of special educators (e.g., early career, mid to late career), we hope to address the shortage of special educators by improving attrition rates of early career special educators while concurrently encouraging and promoting leadership roles for in-service special educators, filling the critical need of administrators with special education expertise.