By Erin Schiltgen, Executive Director, Educate Pathways
Somewhere in your building right now is a teacher living their first few weeks in the profession. They are running on adrenaline and coffee, replaying every lesson on the drive home, and quietly wondering whether they are truly cut out for this work. If you have been in education for any length of time, you were once exactly that person. And if you think back, you can probably still name the leader who made those early days feel survivable.
I think about that often in the work we do at Educate Pathways, because so many of the educators we serve are stepping into a classroom of their own for the very first time. What happens in these opening weeks matters enormously. Study after study points the same direction: the first years are make-or-break, and the first weeks set the tone for a new teacher’s entire year, and often for whether they stay in the profession at all.
It is so easy, though, for a first-year teacher to slip into the blur of a busy start. The welcome breakfast is over, the schedules are set, and the newest person on staff is suddenly just in it, sinking or swimming alongside everyone else. This rarely happens out of neglect. It is simply what happens when a building is moving fast and everyone is stretched thin. But this stretch is also a rare and short window to do the opposite: to make sure a new teacher feels known and wanted before the hard days pile up.
The good news, and this is the part I most want school leaders to hear, is that this is not one more thing for you to carry alone. The most powerful thing you can do for a new teacher is not to personally solve every problem they will face. It is to connect them. To a mentor who checks in without being asked. To a grade-level or content team that treats their success as a shared responsibility. To the colleagues who will be their first call when a lesson falls apart at 9:15 on a Tuesday.
ASCD has a practical piece on exactly this, Relational Support for New Teachers, and what I appreciate most about it is how ordinary the moves are. A genuine welcome. An invitation to sit with the team at lunch. Someone who notices when a new teacher is underwater and simply pulls up a chair. None of it is expensive. All of it says the same thing: you belong here, and you are not doing this alone.
If you are looking for a place to start, a few small things go a long way:
- Make it personal. Learn something real about each new teacher in your building, and bring it up the next time you pass them in the hall. Being seen as a person, not a hire, is its own kind of support.
- Give them a name, not a policy. Every new teacher should have a specific person they can go to when they are stuck. Not a handbook. A human who has said, out loud, “come find me.”
- Protect their time. Give them explicit permission to leave when the work is done, and mean it. Modeling sustainability is a lesson too.
- Check in about them, not their paperwork. “How are you, really?” is a complete conversation. Some of the most important check-ins have no agenda at all.
None of this replaces the craft a new teacher is working so hard to build. It surrounds it. And it reflects something we believe deeply at Educate Pathways: that our greatest strength in this profession has never been any one of us, but all of us, moving in the same direction. A first-year teacher who feels that from the start is a teacher far more likely to still be here in year five, and year fifteen.
So in these early weeks, find a moment for the newest people on your staff. A short hallway conversation. A check-in that is really about them. A simple reminder that they are not doing this alone. It is a small thing, and a new teacher will remember it for a very long time.