Elfert and Clarke (2015) identified seven challenge categories faced by cooperating teachers who were considering welcoming a student teacher into their classroom:

• Becoming a [cooperating] teacher
• Duties and responsibilities of [cooperating] teachers
• Developing relationships with [student teachers]
• Criteria, benchmarks, and evaluation
• Feedback to the supervising/cooperating teacher
• Professional relationships throughout the system
• Integrating the [cooperating] teachers’ role into the teacher education program
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“Cooperating teachers face a dilemma when inviting student teachers into their classroom: Their desire to foster the next generation of teachers is potentially in tension with their commitment to their pupils.”

— Elfert and Clarke (2015)

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Additionally, “Cooperating teachers face a dilemma when inviting student teachers into their classroom: Their desire to foster the next generation of teachers is potentially in tension with their commitment to their pupils.”  

The authors also identified five key motivators for becoming a cooperating teacher:

• “An increase in one’s own professional knowledge as a result of the interaction with someone who is learning to teach”
• The opportunity to “think more deeply about [one’s] own teaching”
• The opportunity to “be exposed to new professional materials”
• “The opportunity to spend more time on lesson and unit planning”
• “Engagement with the university as a result of working with student teachers, which constitutes a source of new knowledge.”

In an analysis of the Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) survey given to 2,000 cooperating teachers since 2009, Elfert and Clarke (2015) identified that for Canadian respondents, the highest potential motivators for being a cooperating teacher were as follows:

• “Mentoring in classroom contexts”
• “Contributing to teacher education”
• “Student teachers promote student engagement”