This unique professional development experience is designed to enhance the skills of teachers in the early years of their profession and to offer ongoing mentoring and support going forward. It is our goal to support and retain promising early career teachers and, consequently, create a much better educational experience for California students.  

 

Our group of past honorees is an impressive group of outstanding educators, with expertise, experience, and an “above & beyond” attitude toward working with their students.  We maximize the impact of this group by matching them as mentors to nominated early career teachers across the state.  They are matched by subject area and geography, and meet at least monthly to discuss teaching, students, and almost anything that the novice teacher might be struggling with.  

 

Our honorees offer twice-monthly webinars on a range of topics, in response to requests by our new teachers.  We offer our honorees a small stipend for both the mentorship and the webinar presentations.  Additionally, the novice teachers have the opportunity to earn units of university credit for their participation in the yearlong TLA. 

 

We also offer an in-person conference for our new teachers, where they spend several days together with our honorees, in sessions and workshops designed to address their most pressing issues and concerns as novice teachers.  As anyone can imagine, this is perhaps one of the most difficult and demanding times to begin a career in education, as students return to classrooms after a long absence.  Additionally, many new teachers did not benefit from a full preparatory student teaching experience, and for some, this is their first actual time with students in a classroom.