Stories

Quality mentoring isn’t just about guidance — it’s a pathway to teacher leadership. Meet Pinky Grace Francisco, 2024 Kau-Kea’au-Pahoa Complex Teacher of the Year and multilingual learner leader. Discover how her experience in Hawai’i’s teacher induction program transformed her journey from mentee to mentor.

For 15+years, NTC has worked closely with Hawai’i’s State Department of Education (HIDOE), beginning with a collaboration designed to establish one of six “new teacher centers” in some of the largest districts in the country. This is the kind of reciprocal learning partnership we thrive on. Today, we are still partnering with the HIDOE to support teacher development, and state induction leaders continue to bring wisdom and innovation to our National Program Leader Network conversations and work overall.

Mentors are a critical lever for teacher success and retention. Rachel Baker, a mentor teacher specialist in Calvert County Public Schools in Maryland, shared her journey with New Teacher Center, emphasizing the importance of validating teachers’ knowledge, commitment, and experience to foster their growth.

In Clint Independent School District, one of the fastest developing areas of El Paso County in West Texas, New Teacher Center helped shape and implement a new vision for instructional leadership. To do this, we first engaged district leaders, principals, assistant principals, teachers, students, and families in a district-wide audit to assess the “current state” of curriculum and instruction. Based on that information, we supported the district to identify aligned curricula for implementation district-wide, then helped design professional learning and coaching focused on instructional leadership. School leaders described the experience as eye-opening and game-changing resulting in a collective shift toward coherent, instructionally focused leadership across the district.

When we are trying to assess the impact of our work, we need to ask the right question. Are we helping to create learning settings in which students can engage at their highest cognitive and creative potential? Our measurement tools and how we define success along the way need to help us understand if we are doing that and, if not, how we can do better.

Meeting the needs of today’s new teacher workforce to help keep them in the classroom calls for comprehensive induction support and the kind of responsive and personalized, instructionally focused mentoring that NTC is known for. Learn how our partners in Fresno USD are using our mentoring model to provide tailored coaching support for new teachers with provisional licenses.