From Advice-Giving to Growth-Guiding: Rethinking
Teacher Mentorship
By TXCEE
How TxCEE’s CLASS program builds confidence and agency among
novice teachers while developing mentors as instructional leaders
Professional development is most transformative and sustainable when teachers are
active participants in shaping it. This teacher-led approach is a hallmark of TxCEE’s
work. As explored in the earlier blog post, “The Power of Peer Collaboration”, the
Collaborative Language Acquisition Strategies for Success (CLASS) program treats
teachers not as passive recipients of training, but as powerful learners who contribute to
one another’s growth.
That same principle shapes the mentorship component of CLASS. Rather than
positioning mentors as experts who simply provide answers, CLASS equips them to
help novice teachers reflect and identify solutions, thereby enabling novices to take
ownership of their professional growth. The result is a mentee-centered model designed
to build skills, confidence, and agency for empowered teaching.
The CLASS Mentorship Program
CLASS is an instructional approach designed to strengthen classroom practice through
sustained, collaborative professional learning. In addition to meeting regularly in
Collaborative Learning Communities with other teachers, beginning teachers receive an
additional layer of support through mentorship.
Within participating schools, novice teachers are paired with experienced mentor
teachers. Mentors use regular points of contact, including formal and informal check-ins,
classroom observations, modeling, reflective conversations, and reviews of student data
to help mentees learn new skills and navigate concerns. Mentors, in turn, receive
guidance, tools, and feedback from TxCEE coaches to help them develop their
leadership and mentorship capacity.
What AIR’s Evaluation Found
TxCEE partnered with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to independently
evaluate CLASS. Interviews and focus groups highlighted the mentee-led approach as
an integral feature of the mentorship component, one that mentors viewed as both novel
and useful.
Rather than telling novice teachers exactly what to do, mentors learn to listen,
paraphrase, and ask purposeful questions. The mentor remains an experienced and
reliable partner, but the mentee does the essential thinking: examining evidence,
weighing options, and developing a plan that fits their students and context.
That shift can require practice. One mentor contrasted her earlier, more directive
mentoring with the mentee-led CLASS approach she adopted with the help of TxCEE
coaches and resources:
“I think that the best support [my TxCEE coach] has given me is how to work with
the mentee so that she’s able to grow and I’m not guiding her in a way where
she’s not flourishing on her own. If you’ve taught for a long time, you have a
tendency to wanna [give directions.] But I kind of step back and let [my mentee]
ask questions and give ideas if she asks for them. So that’s probably been the
best thing [from CLASS].”
Another mentor teacher described a similar change in her approach:
“The training and stuff that [TxCEE] gave us this year is now giving [mentee
teachers] the power to come up with a solution. So that’s where my mindset
changed. Instead of telling them what to do, I now give them those guiding
questions so that they can come up with their solutions and make it their own.”
A Model That Develops Two Teachers at Once
In this way, CLASS mentorship not only supports novice teachers, but mentors as well.
Experienced teachers learn to step back, listen carefully, ask stronger questions, and
adapt their support to another educator’s style, knowledge, and students.
The result is a model that develops two educators at once: a novice teacher who is
increasingly able to analyze challenges and act with confidence, and a mentor who is
increasingly skilled at cultivating growth in others. For schools seeking to strengthen
instruction and sustain new teachers, that shared capacity may be the greatest power of
a mentee-led approach.