The most important part of any school is its teachers. Excellent teachers need meaningful professional development, useful evaluations, and supportive teaching environments. They also need many opportunities to share best practices with colleagues.

Excellent teachers love teaching, have high expectations, and believe all kids can achieve academic success. They build safe and respectful classroom communities, and work well with students, parents, administrators, and other colleagues. This is a challenging task, which is why our teachers deserve expert supervision and support. Teachers need to know their strengths and work with other professionals to grow and improve.

All over Massachusetts, including Cambridge, teachers are retiring and leaving the profession. Especially now, the Cambridge Public Schools need to be proactive in retaining teachers and hiring excellent new teachers from diverse backgrounds. The best way to keep new teachers is to provide them with helpful and supportive mentors. Teaching can be isolating; therefore, we must provide our new teachers with the time and resources they need to succeed. Experienced teachers are a great resource. We need to study the existing mentoring structure to see if the time and incentives are motivating and appropriate to make this key effort successful.