Mentoring Teachers to Create High-Quality Classrooms

Morgan Smith: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

Today we are talking about something that could make a positive difference in the lives of many Texas teachers and their students: high-quality mentorship.

The formalized practice of having more experienced teachers coach those newer in the profession could help with a major challenge facing Texas public schools — teacher shortages. It also benefits everyone involved — from the experienced teachers acting as mentors who now have a chance to learn new skills, to the newer teachers they are supporting, and to the students who now have confident, calm educators in the classroom.

So why aren’t high-quality mentoring programs more common in Texas public schools? Well, as is often the case, the reasons for that mostly come down to time and money.

Right now in Austin, some lawmakers are trying to change that by expanding an existing pilot mentorship program. Two proposals to would do that — House Bill 11 and Senate Bill 9 — have both passed their home chamber but are currently stuck in limbo waiting for hearings in the second. With less than two weeks left in the legislative session, time is running out for either of these bills to make it.

Morgan: While teachers can sometimes find peers to reach out to organically, research shows formalized, high-quality mentorship programs deliver the best results — especially when it comes to teachers working with vulnerable student populations. And those programs have specific characteristics.

Mario Piña: A high-quality mentorship program has a lot of components. I think first of all, it has time for teachers to reflect with their mentors, and usually this really needs to happen during the school day. And it needs to have the time for the mentor to observe their mentee and vice versa, because if they're not being able to see what's happening or how something can be done, they're not going to be able to execute that in the way that's most effective.

Morgan: Mario Piña is a Regional Advocacy Director with Raise Your Hand Texas. Before joining them in 2022, he spent nine years in Austin ISD as an elementary and middle school teacher, and instructional coach.  

Mario: And I think definitely making sure that we're paying people. A lot of times in school districts, people are being asked to be mentors and are not being compensated and not giving the time to mentor their mentees, and so it becomes really difficult for them to find the time during the day to really help each other out, and so it becomes more of a chore rather than a real mentorship process.

There's so many other things that teachers are worried about. They're worried about grading. They're worried about making sure that their students are okay. They're making sure they have high-quality lessons. And so having time to go talk to their mentor is probably at the very bottom of their list a lot of times.

And I think the other part of it is training for the mentors themselves. A lot of times, teachers are being asked to be mentors but are provided no training, and we have this idea that just because you're a really good teacher, you're going to be a really good mentor, and that's not always the case. I know that when I was a teacher, a lot of the times my mentor would come and ask me, "Hey, what do you need help with?" And unfortunately, as a first- or second-year teacher, you don't know what you need. And so asking me what I need help with or how am I doing isn't always the most helpful, because I don't know what I don't know. And so we really need teachers to have that training of how to ask the questions, setting those goals and working on those goals together, and really guiding that novice teacher.

Morgan: A high-quality mentorship program can provide much-needed time for collaboration and support during the early days of teaching, which can be a trial-by-fire for many new educators. Mentors are also around to help new teachers figure out the simple everyday logistics that anyone who’s ever started a new job knows can be quite daunting — like making sure they know how to use the copier, or that there’s a bathroom in the teachers’ lounge. Most importantly, they help their mentees hone their instructional strategies and master classroom management – all skills that translate directly into improving students’ academic outcomes, which also makes mentoring programs an excellent financial investment for the state.

Jerome Johnson: It's like that famous Mike Tyson quote, that everybody has a plan until they get punched