On a bright October afternoon, Esmeralda Orozco rapidly filled pages of notes as Priscilla Aguilar, a senior at San Diego State University majoring in education, worked to get Castle Park High School students excited about triangles.
While the students recorded different ways to prove similarity via angles and sides, Orozco captured Aguilar’s timing: the ways she moved around the packed classroom, the questions she asked, the pointer she gave students. And when the students left, Aguilar got feedback of her own.
Orozco, a 24-year veteran math teacher, is spending this school year as a “teacher on special assignment” in the Sweetwater Union High School district here. The three-year positions allow experienced teachers to step out of the classroom to mentor and coach both novice and experienced teachers in areas like assessment or special education. While Orozco mentors four math student-teachers, including Aguilar, she also provides ongoing training to teachers districtwide.
New teachers increasingly enter the profession through alternative routes that aim to get them into classrooms more quickly, but often give them less hands-on practice beforehand. That’s led to rising popularity for teacher mentors and coaches. But positions like Orozco’s may be more vulnerable in the face of declining enrollment, lower revenue, the end of pandemic aid, and steep cuts to federal teacher-training grants.
On-the-job mentoring and coaching have become critical, according to Joshua Barnett, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, which works with more than 11,000 schools nationwide to improve professional development and career pathways for teachers.
“Ultimately teachers need to have and enter schools where high-quality professional learning is provided for all of the teachers,” Barnett said.
Building novice teacher confidence
Studies find that effective mentors can help shorten the learning curve for new teachers. With good mentoring, novice educators in their first year can boost student learning to the same degree as a teacher with three years’ experience in the classroom.
The most effective mentors and coaches need deep knowledge of their content and pedagogy, but also credibility among their peers, said Barnett, who has studied teacher mentoring and coaching systems in Texas and Louisiana.
“It’s important that the person is not simply someone who has been in the space, but someone that’s been able to demonstrate their actual ability to improve opportunities for students,” Barnett said. “They are not just capable of educating students, but they’re actually an expert in effective instructional practices, and are willing to share that with other adults.”
Most of all, coaches and mentors must be able to build trust, according to Barnett and Vera-Lisa Roberts, a program specialist with the California-based nonprofit New Teacher Center, which helps train instructional coaches and works to improve teacher induction programs in 30 states.
“You have to think about, what does it mean to sit down and work alongside an adult? They’re not just big children,” she said. “I’m not going to feel comfortable with you coming in and observing my classroom unless I have that trusting relationship with you and know that you are really here to support me.”
Orozco’s mentoring role focuses on the use of assessment and research. That means not just guiding student-teachers like Aguilar, but also overhauling the way all Sweetwater teachers gauge student progress.
She’s been trained to use a “POP” cycle for teacher mentoring, with meetings for pre-observation, observation, and post-observation debriefings. While Orozco formally observes student-teachers for evaluation later in the year, Orozco’s class visit in October was a practice walk-through to help Aguilar hone her approach.
Before the observation, Aguilar asked for help with pacing and time management, particularly when adjusting the same content activities to fit two-hour classes and 50-minute classes. She voiced frustration that she had run out of time to walk through the sixth problem of the exercise.
“A lot of [students], when I was walking around the groups, they were still working on getting [problems] two and four done,” Aguilar explained. “So I just felt like they didn’t have enough time to complete those two and I didn’t want to say, ‘OK, forget about that, now we’re doing this.’”
“You didn’t want them to rush,” Orozco said. “That’s really good.”
Orozco encouraged Aguilar to use more wait time in class discussions, noting that she sometimes answered the questions she posed to students rather than waiting for them to respond. After the two discuss ways to use the students’ notebooks for review, Aguilar decides to use the missed example as a weekend challenge.
“If it’s going to be a challenge here, why not have them wrestle with it a bit? Because I know they’re capable of doing it,” Aguilar said.
Orozco approved. “I love that you said that. ‘I know they’re capable.’ So you believe all your students can learn at high levels.”
Basing coaching and mentoring around solving these sorts of day-to-day problems of practice can do more to improve teaching than just basing professional development on accountability data, said Barnett of NIET.
“It’s not just standardized tests; it could be your weekly spelling test,” Barnett said. “If I know that the 2nd graders are misspelling certain words, then that informs me as a teacher-leader to say, what is it that we’re not teaching?”
Mentoring can help experienced teachers, too
Nationwide, nearly 60 percent of public schools have at least one instructional coach or mentor for teachers, and more than 40 percent of public schools have hired more of these staff since the pandemic, according to the most recent federal data in 2023-24.
State and foundation teacher quality grants have helped support Sweetwater’s special assignment teachers, who go beyond just mentoring and induction for new teachers to provide ongoing training for veterans, who are less likely to get the support.
For example, this spring, Orozco is working with professional learning communities at each school on “learning walks,” or voluntary class observations that help her collect best practices as well as common problems and frustrations. She and other teachers will use the results of the learning walks to design teacher professional development for next year.
“I really, really enjoy that part because teachers open their doors on a volunteer basis, and we walk into their classrooms and we see all the exciting things that they’re exploring and they’re learning about,” Orozco said. “We hope to send a message that we are all learners in this, and we’re all trying to figure out what it is that helps students achieve.”
While new teachers are the most likely to get coaching and mentoring, studies find all teachers can benefit from it, particularly for changing instructional approaches and technology. In particular, one new study found higher-performing novice teachers and veteran teachers still need—but often don’t get—coaching to improve more advanced teaching skills like questioning students or facilitating group projects.
In Sweetwater, Orozco spent the morning before Aguilar’s observation at the nearby Mar Vista High, training administrators and department heads to use the district’s new assessment platform.
“Before, we were kind of stuck in this cycle where [the district] had to give us common formative assessments and then we’d look at the results together,” Orozco said. “But by the time they’re looking at results, it’s too late; teachers have moved on to other lessons. ... So now we’re focusing attention on formative lesson design. When we are delivering instruction, how do we give immediate feedback?”
By February, she was getting thank-you notes from teachers using the new tools. Aguilar is now serving as a substitute teacher in the district while she completes her training program.
Sweetwater Union’s special assignments are three-year positions, and Orozco said she appreciated the opportunity to stretch professionally.
“I’ve always loved working with new teachers,” Orozco said.
But the special assignment has been Orozco’s first time without a class of her own in her 24-year career, and she said she’ll probably return when the special assignment is done after next school year.
“I miss my classroom,” she said simply."I miss my kids.”
