UNE addresses national teacher shortage with new high school mentorship program

In late June, 13 rising high school seniors from across southern Maine gathered on University of New England’s Biddeford campus for the inaugural Future Teachers of Maine Summer Institute. The week-long institute was created by associate professor Lane Clarke, Ed.D., and directed by assistant teaching professor Krysten Gorrivan, M.S. Ed.

Gorrivan said that one of the main goals of the institute was to give high school students the tools and resources to follow their goals of becoming educators and support the national teacher shortage.

“The idea was that if we can get some high school students interested in college who might not otherwise go, it would help to create sort of a pipeline from high school right through college (and into education),” Gorrivan said.

Gorrivan said that they worked on building partnerships with local high schools to find students in underrepresented communities or who may be first generation college students.

Every day the students visited with two classroom teachers at various grade levels to hear about what it’s like to be an educator and to ask questions. Additionally, the students met with representatives from a number of Maine colleges and universities to learn about programs offered. They also took tours of UNE’s facilities, and learned about the student support they could receive.

Gorrivan said the program was focused not only on helping the students become educators, but also about helping them feel comfortable as they begin their journey to college in the next year.

“Every student that was there had some level of anxiety or depression. So we broke down anything that might cause them to be anxious, such as staying in the dorms, eating in the cafeteria, going to a college classroom; all of that is now demystified for them,” Gorrivan said.

A large part of this support came from the four UNE education majors that served as student mentors of the institute.

Class of ’25 Education majors, Ryan Mosscrop and Morgan Bassett, spent the week mentoring the students in the seminars as well as monitoring the high schoolers in the evenings. The UNE students ran activities, ate meals together, and stayed in the dorms with them.

“Helping work with kids who haven't figured out where they want to go yet, but kind of know what they want to do was a really cool experience for me,” Mosscrop said. “It's part of the reason I want to be a high school teacher. I want to be able to help kids through that college transition.”