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At Tustin Unified School District, new teachers and their mentors use video of classroom instruction to find which areas of their practice work, and which need improvement.

Welcoming new teachers is exciting, but bringing these teachers up to speed can be a challenge. You can hire new teachers with a history of academic achievement in college and a sterling in-service record, but in the end, there is no substitute for boots-on-the-ground experience. Educators coming from the best teacher prep backgrounds are still going to need additional mentoring as they begin their careers.

But short of sending an endless string of evaluators to their classrooms — a prospect likely to make anyone nervous and knock them off their teaching game — how can you get those teachers the support they need? More to the point, how can you make sure those providing the support are targeting their mentorship to the facets of the job where your new teachers are most in need of growth?

At Tustin Unified School District in California, the solution we've hit on is to combine in-class video recordings with our teacher induction program. In the end, our newest teachers were saying they grew most by "watching myself teach and watching students respond to the things I said or the experiences I set up in the classroom."