It’s no secret that keeping new teachers in the profession can be hard and that the challenge is especially acute in special education as evidenced by chronic shortages in this high-need teaching area.

In this 2023 study on special education teacher turnover, Teach Plus researchers identified some of the big reasons teachers in special education leave the profession or move to general education positions. Despite their passion and commitment to the students they serve, special education teachers typically:

• are not adequately prepared in pre-service for the significant non-instructional parts of the job
• don’t receive effective mentorship and professional learning
• struggle with a workload that is unsustainable and harmful to their mental health
• receive inadequate support from school leaders who don’t have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and duties

As a leader in teacher induction, we’ve benefitted from working with dedicated partners at the local, state, and regional levels to learn from and better support new teachers in special education. And we’ve heard again and again that our mentoring model — our relationship-based, student-centered approach, our optimal learning environment framework, and our high-leverage tools — is uniquely aligned with what special education teachers need as they enter their profession.

As part of our Bright Spots & Big Ideas in Teacher Induction series, we’ve highlighted our partners’ incredible work in new teacher support, including Minnesota, one of several partner states that invests heavily in its new teachers. In addition to supporting the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a statewide induction pilot program, we are also currently providing technical assistance linked with state funding for regional and local initiatives that prioritize support to meet the unique needs of new special education teachers.

Our experience working with the state’s Southwest West Central Service Cooperative (SWWC) goes back to 2018 with SWWC special education coaches adapting NTC’s mentoring model and creating a playbook of NTC tools and strategies to support new special education teachers in this rural region of the state.

We talked with Jessica Robinson about her experience as an SWWC instructional coach for teachers providing special education services through the region’s Educational Learning Centers. She stressed that mentor support needs to take into account the realities and responsibilities, both instructional and non-instructional, across a variety of kinds of special education classrooms to meet an extremely wide range of student learning needs. This includes myriad practical and legal requirements.

Recognizing that no college class could adequately address many of these challenges, Jess described the pressure these beginning educators face as being “brand new and needing to be completely on their game.” That’s where NTC’s approach to mentoring and support comes in.

Jess shared the following insights from her work adapting our model to meet the needs of new special education teachers.

1. Establishing relationships with students

NTC tools and conversation protocols help mentors prioritize the need for special education teachers to establish affirming relationships first and foremost with their students. “It’s important to not just go right to that academic piece, to take the time to get to know each student, to build that rapport,” Jess said. Emphasis on building trust with each student is important because so many students in special education have struggled for years, experiencing in some cases, what Jess characterized as “broken relationships” with multiple teachers. She added, “it can take a lot of healing for some students to be open to learning.”

The range of student needs in any one class is also daunting, especially for a new teacher. “Special education classrooms can be a little like a one-room schoolhouse. Students have such individual needs, and yet you’re trying to do some large group instruction, some small group instruction, some individual instruction, just to make sure that they get all those needs met. There isn’t any typical cookie cutter student that comes through, … you have to know them,” she said. She also stressed that a critical mindset to have from the “get-go” is to “presume competence,” communicating high expectations and confidence in the student’s capacity to learn.

2. Using a social and emotional approach to classroom management

Behavioral challenges can complicate relationship building in special education classrooms. “If you can’t communicate in a traditional way, you resort to another way, and that’s behavior, to get your needs met,” Jess said. “Nobody can prepare you in college for what that reality is, so we spend a lot of time on classroom management, de-escalation techniques, how to respond, reinforcing the behaviors that we want to see, which is essentially tied to social and emotional training and support for students.”

Jess says that coaching using NTC’s optimal learning environment framework is another way to minimize behavioral barriers to learning, including focusing on:

• supported risk-taking
• safe and engaged interactions/co-created procedures, routines, classroom design
• developmentally appropriate/culturally relevant strategies for expression of emotions and conflict resolution
• learner variability
• multiple pathways to learn and demonstrate
• learner agency

3. Working with other adults in the classroom

Depending on the type of classroom, new special education teachers will likely be working with multiple paraprofessionals and service providers, including physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, behavioral analysts, social workers, and school counselors. Jess shared how having that much expertise in the room can be both daunting and a relief for a beginning teacher. “You’re a brand new teacher, and you’re like, ‘I want all the opinions. Tell me what I need to know.’ But it can also be hard to discern what to prioritize for a particular student, especially if they have different opinions. You’re trying to weave together all of these suggestions to develop a cohesive plan for that student. The new teacher is one member of a team with a lot of working parts.”

In her work with new special education teachers, Jess has helped teachers learn how to use NTC coaching methodologies and tools with some of the other adults they work with. “That might involve working with a paraprofessional using data to link a practice to observed outcomes for kids — ‘when we do this, if we change our prompting hierarchy, or if we do a preference assessment, or we find this reinforcer, this is what happens to our data.’ Adult coaching skills help new teachers build confidence in navigating those situations, especially if they’re younger and brand new and in the room with people who, perhaps, have been there longer,” she said.

4. Seeing the paperwork through a different lens

The paperwork special education teachers have to complete can be overwhelming, and not just at first; it continues to be a big lift. As a coach, Jess said she tries to steer away from telling teachers how to complete the Individualized Education Program (IEP) and other paperwork. “We want the coaching to be centered around building relationships with students, lesson development, data analysis, pre-observation conversations, and the feedback from observations, really using teaching and coaching tools as they are intended. Of course, the documentation informs instructional decisions, but, ultimately, we try to stay focused on using those pedagogical practices to make sure we have good outcomes for kids. And what we often find is that what we surface with instructional coaching is aligned with the information you need to complete your paperwork. It’s not something extra.”

Jess said that when she first starts working with a teacher, she might start with the Knowing Students tool, being very intentional about the questions she asks and supporting the teacher to access due process paperwork to find information as they are shaping a profile of the student. Eventually, teachers realize they can cut and paste the information they need for their paperwork from what they’ve gathered through Knowing Students and other NTC tools. More importantly, she said, teachers realize, “okay, what I get from this tool is far more fleshed out than what I need to meet federal requirements. That’s when they start to realize what we mean when we talk about knowing our students. It’s about being intentional. How are we going to address learning diversity? How can we create optimal learning environments?”

5. Aligning standards and IEP goals

Jess described the struggle many special education teachers have in approaching teaching standards. She said that while special ed teachers are aware of teaching standards, they are also wrangling with IEP goals, assessing students, developing programming, and documenting student progress. As a coach, she focuses on how to tie an IEP goal to a teaching standard. She often employs NTC’s Planning Conversation Guide, using the IEP goal as the teaching standard but following the same process to identify benchmarks for getting closer to grade level.

She also shared how she uses the Analyzing Student Learning (ASL) tool, designed to target a specific teaching standard over a short series of lessons. “In the special education world, a student may require 100 opportunities to learn a concept (compared to a child who may only require exposure to a new concept a dozen times or less). Students in special education programming may need a month or even an entire quarter to make observable progress on an objective or benchmark. Tracking these goals over time using the ASL allows special education teachers to observe small units of progress,” she said.

As Minnesota continues to prioritize the needs of beginning special education teachers in its statewide induction programming, we are so grateful for the opportunity to work with coaches like Jess and our partners in SWWC, MDE, and the state’s other regional cooperatives, schools, and districts.