UW hosts fifth Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps summer institute

The University of Wyoming is hosting the fifth Summer Mentor Institute for the Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps on its Laramie campus, extending a statewide effort aimed at keeping newer teachers in Wyoming classrooms and stabilizing schools across Albany County and beyond.

The corps began in 2022 as a College of Education initiative, and UW has named a new cohort each year since then. The university welcomed a second group on May 11, 2023, a third on April 19, 2024 and a fourth on May 1, 2025, building a recurring pipeline rather than a one-time training session. UW said the program is designed to foster teacher excellence and provide expert support for emerging teachers.

That retention focus is at the center of the work. UW’s January 28 call for nominations for the fifth cohort said the corps is meant to build a community of educator fellows who can support one another and new teachers. The model matters in a state where schools often face staffing shortages, geographic isolation and the challenge of recruiting teachers to rural communities.

When UW hosted the fourth cohort’s Summer Mentor Institute in late June 2025, the campus gathering included 18 experienced educators from across Wyoming. The university described the Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps as an 18-month program, a timeline that gives mentors and newer teachers time to work through the realities of the school year rather than stopping at a single workshop. That longer runway is the part that could matter most for retention, since early-career teachers often decide whether to stay based on the support they receive in the first years on the job.

The University of Wyoming has also folded the work into a wider teacher-support network. Its College of Education offers mentor-teacher support resources through residency and student-teaching pages, and it runs a separate Wyoming Rural Teacher Corps focused on early-career teachers in rural communities. Together, those efforts make UW one of the state’s main hubs for teacher preparation and retention work.

For Albany County, the impact is bigger than campus traffic or summer professional development. Laramie sits at the center of a system meant to send trained mentors back into schools across Wyoming, where keeping a teacher in place can mean keeping a classroom stable, a program intact and a school community from starting over yet again.