Reflections on Remote Mentoring: Is This the Future of New Teacher Support?

The COVID-19 pandemic required teacher preparation programs to shift and think creatively about how to best support their teacher candidates, recent graduates, and graduate students. In response to these challenges, in Fall 2020 the authors developed a remote mentoring partnership between first-year teachers and graduate students enrolled in a reading specialist/leadership course at their university. The graduate students served as mentors to the first-year teachers (mentees) as they navigated the journey of not just being a new teacher, but doing so in the midst of a pandemic. Reflections on what this mentoring partnership looked like, topics explored and perspectives of both mentor and mentees were shared and analyzed. Partnerships similar to the one described in this article can serve as a potential model for teacher preparation programs, especially as schools confront the aftermath of the pandemic and the burgeoning teacher shortage.