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Session 2. Career Stages, Pathways and Induction
Objective. Design a stage map with more than one pathway, roles that need little or no extra pay, and a first-year induction plan with a realistic mentor time budget for a school or cluster.
Most schools can tell you who the best teachers are, but few can tell them what comes next. A career system answers two simple questions for every teacher: where could I be in five years, and who will help me get there? This lesson goes beyond the key ideas on pathways and induction: how to share opportunity fairly, and what a mentor actually does in the first six weeks so that the mentor load you counted is spent well.
Key ideas
Stages by evidence, with more than one road
- A career ladder with only one direction, towards the head's office, pulls the best classroom teachers out of classrooms. Singapore's Ministry of Education describes three career tracks (Teaching, School Leadership, Senior Specialist) and says teachers can move between them if they meet the requirements. AITSL describes four stages of the same career: Graduate, Proficient, Highly Accomplished, Lead.
- Use years as a gate, not as proof: a teacher with 15 years may still be at the Established stage, and a teacher with 4 years may already lead a small team. Write the evidence that shows each stage (lessons, pupil work, a colleague helped), taken from your framework in Session 1.
- Write the rules down and make them the same for everyone. Hidden criteria turn a pathway into favouritism.
Roles that recognise growth without a new salary
- Many useful roles cost time, not money: mentor, induction lead, subject or grade coordinator, peer-observation lead, textbook-materials lead, cluster trainer. Give each a one-paragraph description with its purpose, time per week and the evidence that earns it.
- Recognition also counts: first choice of courses, a voice in timetable or textbook decisions, a certificate from the head or district, an invitation to lead a cluster session. These must be real and visible to be worth anything.
- Anything about pay, grades or formal qualification categories is set by ministry regulations. Check with the district office what is allowed, and never promise a school-level change you cannot deliver.
Induction: the first year decides a lot
- New teachers often meet conditions that exceed their skills and confidence. An OECD analysis of TALIS data notes that induction and mentoring help bridge training and daily teaching, and that having a programme available is not the same as new teachers actually having a mentor. England provides a two-year training entitlement for early career teachers.
- A simple shape: before the start (timetable, textbooks, routines, a named buddy); weeks 1-6 (buddy visits, two observations of others, a lighter extra-duty load); each month of term 1 (a 30-minute conversation); end of year (review against the framework and a plan for year two).
- Include teachers who are new to your school or to a new grade, not only graduates. They too arrive without the local routines.
Budget in periods, and check fairness
- Time is the main currency. Count mentor time in 45-minute periods per week and ask who covers the lessons. A mentor with four mentees is a mentor in name only: many schools do better with one or two mentees per mentor.
- Choose mentors by evidence of good teaching and of listening, not only by age or rank, and give them a short briefing (building on Peer Observation, 11.9). Check the plan for fairness: are the criteria written, can a teacher ask why, are small rural schools served by a cluster arrangement?
- Trade-off: releasing mentors costs lessons now; skipping it costs resignations and weak habits later. Decide with the numbers in front of you.
An induction year
Sharing roles fairly
A role without limits becomes a burden. Give each role a term, for example two years, so that opportunity moves and nobody holds a title for ever. Publish the criteria and the process on one page: what evidence is considered, who decides, and how a teacher can ask why. Limit each person to one or two roles so that your strongest teachers do not carry five jobs and burn out.
Watch for patterns. If every role goes to teachers in the central school, or to those who are close to the head, the pathway is a favour system. Keep a simple table of who holds which role and look at it once a year with a colleague from outside the school. Where the school is small, share roles across the cluster so that a teacher in a village school can still lead something.
What a mentor does in the first six weeks
A mentor's first job is not to teach the new teacher how to teach but to make the school legible: where the textbooks are, how absences are handled, who to ask about what. In week one they plan one lesson together. In weeks two to four the new teacher watches the mentor teach, and the mentor watches the new teacher once with one look-for chosen by the new teacher. Each meeting ends with one small next step.
Keep the role clean. A mentor is not an evaluator: what a new teacher says about a hard lesson is not passed to the head, except where a pupil's safety is at stake, and this limit is explained at the start. Give mentors a two- or three-hour briefing on listening, asking questions and giving feedback, as in Peer Observation (11.9).
Examples from the classroom
Roles with a two-year term
Scene. In a Fergana school of 38 teachers the head creates six coordinator roles, each worth one period a week and held for two years. Teachers apply with a half-page note on what they would do and what evidence they have. A panel of the head and two teachers chooses, and the reasons are given in writing to every applicant. After two years, three of the six roles pass to new people, and the school sees four teachers it had never thought of as leaders.
Insight. Terms, written criteria and reasons turn a favour into a fair opportunity.
The teacher who was not chosen
Scene. Gulnora, 24 years in a Tashkent school, is not selected as a mentor because her pupils' writing samples do not show the practice the mentors are to model. The head meets her for 20 minutes, shows her the written criteria, names two strengths and asks her to lead the school book exchange before Navruz. Gulnora says she will think about it. In March she asks to try the writing practice in one class with a colleague's help.
Insight. A respectful explanation and another meaningful route keep a senior colleague inside the system.
A mentor for two village schools
Scene. In a small school near the Aral Sea region, the new teacher Jasur is the only teacher of Grades 5-9 in his subject. The district gives a mentor from a school 30 km away one day a month, and the mentor and Jasur agree on a phone call every second week. Jasur spends one day each term in the mentor's school watching two lessons. The head of his own school covers his classes for those days with a combined group.
Insight. Where a school is too small for its own mentor, cluster arrangements are the answer, with the time counted.
Common pitfalls
- Choosing mentors by age or title instead of by evidence of good teaching and listening.
- Giving a mentor four or five mentees and no time, so that mentoring exists only in the plan.
- Letting the mentor also write the new teacher's evaluation.
- Forgetting teachers who are new to the school or to a new grade, not only graduates.
Pathway and Induction Plan for a 40-Teacher School
- Open the Kit: staff profile of a SAMPLE school with 40 teachers, seven of them new. In your own school you will use real, anonymous numbers. Read it alone. (6 min)
- Trios (14 min): draw a stage map with four stages and two pathways (classroom expert and school leader). For each stage write one piece of evidence from the Session 1 framework and the years that act only as a gate.
- Trios (12 min): choose three roles that need time but no new salary. Write for each purpose, hours per week, selection evidence and who covers the lessons.
- Trios (16 min): build the induction year for the seven new teachers: before start, weeks 1-6, monthly in term 1, end of year. Calculate mentors needed (at most 2 mentees each), mentor periods per week and the periods needed for new teachers to observe others.
- Whole group (5 min): each trio names its biggest cost in periods and the one thing it would cut or share with a neighbouring school to afford it.
- Part B, fairness and risk check (22 min): in pairs, read your plan as (a) a new teacher, (b) a 25-year teacher not chosen as a mentor, (c) the district officer. Write one objection from each and one change to answer it.
- Alone (10 min): write your leadership task from the Kit.
Your facilitator will guide you through this activity in the session.
Questions to discuss
- Which role in your stage map would keep an excellent classroom teacher in the classroom, and what does it cost in periods?
- What did the mentor time calculation show about what is realistic in your school?
- Which objection from the fairness check was hardest to answer, and why?
Reflect
- What did your own first year in a school look like? What one thing would have helped most?
- Who left your school in the last three years, and what would have kept them?
- Which senior teachers could mentor well but have never been asked?
Try it tomorrow
- Draw your school's roles on one page and write the term, the time and the criteria next to each.
- Ask your newest teacher: 'What was the first thing you did not know how to find?' and add it to your induction list.
- Count the mentor periods your school actually gives today, and compare them with what you designed in the session.
Further reading and links
Show every teacher a stage map with more than one road and evidence-based rules, and protect the first year with a mentor plan counted in real periods.