Teacher development & mentorship
Where teachers grow: onboarding, mentorship, and the development arc of a teacher’s early years.
Most schools onboard a new teacher with a handshake and a key. Mentorship happens informally when someone has time, and the growth arc of a teacher’s first three years is left largely to chance. Teacher Farm is the structured alternative: a purpose-built development layer that runs on the same staff roster and PD catalog the school already uses, so a mentor, a new hire, and a department chair can see the induction journey in one place — not across a folder of onboarding PDFs and a spreadsheet of PD hours. Here is exactly what is built and what is being wired.
The PD course catalog and the staff roster — the substrate this development layer runs on — are shipped. The mentor/mentee pairing and induction workflow surface are early access: being built on top of the shipped foundation. We say so plainly rather than presenting the whole picture as finished.
What is built
The modules below are code that exists and runs. The ones marked “early access” are the pieces that bridge the shipped foundation to the full induction and mentorship surface — being actively built, not yet a complete interface.
The PD course catalog
Schools catalog their own professional development offerings — the title, format, provider, credit hours, session date, and registration window. Staff register directly; the engine places over-capacity registrations on a waitlist rather than dropping them. The HR officer reads the full offering roster: seated versus waitlisted, seats remaining. Registration closes at the window; duplicate registration is refused. A new teacher’s induction track is built on top of this catalog: the courses that make up an induction pathway are offerings in the catalog, not a parallel system. Shipped
The PD hours rollup toward renewal
Professional development activities are recorded with hours completed, the date, the session title, and which credential the hours count toward. A PD summary for any staff member shows the period hours, the per-credential progress toward required renewal hours, and the renewal-due count — a deterministic, auditable report. For a new teacher on an induction track, this is the progress view: how many hours of the required induction PD are logged, against the renewal window that applies to their license tier. Shipped — persistence binding in progress
The staff roster with roles
The official staff list for a school — with roles (administrator, adviser, staffer, and the minor flag enforced), hire dates, departments, positions, and assignments. The roster is the identity layer the mentor/mentee pairing and the induction candidate pool sit on top of. A staff member added to the roster is immediately available as a mentee candidate, a mentor candidate, or an induction cohort member — the development layer reads the same record the rest of the platform reads. Shipped
The onboarding candidate pool
The staff cockpit exposes a candidate pool: school members not yet placed in a publication or role, available for a bulk-onboarding picker. For teacher development, this pool is the source of new teachers not yet assigned to an induction cohort — an administrator can see at a glance who has been placed and who has not, without a separate new-hire tracker. Shipped
Mentor/mentee pairing and induction pathway assignment
The pairing and induction workflow layer — assigning a mentor to a new teacher, enrolling the new teacher in an induction pathway, tracking milestone completion, and generating the induction progress view for the department chair — is being built on top of the shipped catalog and roster. The data models are designed; the workflow surface is not yet a shipped interface. We are not presenting this as available today. Early access
How the development arc fits together
The growth path of a new teacher runs through four stages: onboarding (placed, rostered, introduced to the school), induction (a structured first-year or first-three-years pathway with required PD, observations, and milestones), mentorship (a paired experienced colleague who holds a caseload, not just an informal check-in), and ongoing development (continuous PD enrollment, credential renewal, and a visible record of professional growth). Teacher Farm is built to support all four — honestly representing which pieces are shipped and which are being built.
The shared staff roster is the identity spine. Every tool in the development layer reads the same record: the hire date, the role, the department, the credential file. A new teacher rostered by an administrator appears immediately in the onboarding candidate pool, is eligible for a mentor pairing, and can be enrolled in a PD catalog offering on the same session. There is no separate new-hire database; the development layer extends the roster it already has.
The PD course catalog is the scheduling and credit engine. An induction pathway is a sequence of catalog offerings — a first-year teacher registers for the same system that any staff member uses for renewal-credit PD, so the hours roll up in the same auditable PD summary. An HR officer sees the induction PD logged alongside continuing-education PD in one view. A mentor’s caseload meetings can be cataloged as PD hours where the induction program designates them — the engine does not treat induction and renewal PD as different things; it applies the same capacity-aware, window-gated, waitlist-safe registration to both.
The mentor/mentee pairing layer is being built on top of this foundation. When it is complete, an administrator will assign a mentor from the experienced-staff pool, enroll a new teacher in an induction pathway, and track milestone completion — with the mentor holding a caseload view, the new teacher holding a progress view, and the department chair holding a cohort view. The data models for this surface are designed. The workflow interface is not yet shipped.
Induction pathways: the honest picture
An induction pathway, in practice, is a required sequence of professional development, observation check-ins, and documented milestones that a new teacher completes in the first one to three years of their license. States differ on the specifics, but the shape is the same: required hours, required touchpoints, and a record that must exist for the license to fully vest.
The shipped PD catalog handles the hours and the registration. The shipped PD hours rollup handles the auditable record. What the shipped layer does not yet have is the pathway object itself — a named sequence of required offerings, with milestone gates and the pairing record that ties a mentor to that pathway alongside a specific new teacher. That is what the early-access layer is building.
When the pathway surface ships, a school will be able to define an induction pathway by name, attach required PD offerings to it, designate milestone check-ins, and enroll a new teacher into it alongside a mentor assignment. The mentor will see their caseload. The new teacher will see their pathway progress. The HR officer will see all open induction cohorts and their completion status. Until that surface ships, schools use the catalog and the PD summary directly — which already carries the hours and the auditable record. The missing piece is the pathway wrapper and the paired mentor view, and those are what we are building now.
What is in progress and what is planned
These are not presented as available today. They are named so that a school, a district HR officer, or a department chair considering this platform can see exactly where the development layer is heading and what the honest state of each piece is.
Mentor/mentee pairing workflow
An administrator assigns a mentor from the experienced-staff pool to a new teacher, creating a caseload record the mentor can read and the administrator can manage. The mentor holds a view of their caseload (who they are paired with, what pathway the new teacher is on, what milestones are due). The new teacher holds a progress view. Pairing is many-to-one (one mentor can hold multiple new teachers); the caseload cap is configurable. Data models designed; workflow interface being built. Early access
Induction pathway object and milestone tracking
A named induction pathway groups required PD offerings, observation check-in touchpoints, and milestone gates into a structured first-year or multi-year sequence. An administrator enrolls a new teacher into a pathway; the system tracks which milestones are complete, which are due, and which are overdue. A pathway is reusable across a cohort of new teachers. The pathway data model is designed; the enrollment and tracking surface is the primary early-access build. Early access
HR persistence binding (live database)
The PD summary rollup and the PD hours log run today as a compute surface. The Prisma data models and the persistence store interface are built. The live DataStore methods that bind them to a school’s real database rows are being wired now. When complete, a teacher’s induction PD hours and credential progress will persist between sessions and be queryable from the induction pathway view. In progress
Cohort view for administrators and department chairs
A cohort-level read for an administrator or department chair: all new teachers in the current induction cohort, their pathway, their mentor pairing, their milestone completion status, and their PD hours to date — without reading individual evaluation records. Designed as a role-scoped aggregate; being built alongside the pathway and pairing surfaces. Planned
Observation touchpoints in the induction pathway
An induction pathway milestone can require a formal or walkthrough observation at a designated point in the first year. The observation record engine (observer, rubric domain scores, evidence reference, observation date) is built in the HR layer; wiring it into the induction milestone check-in is a planned step once the pathway object ships. Planned
New-teacher resource links from the pathway
A pathway milestone can link to a curated resource from the school’s own shared shelf — a lesson template, a classroom procedure document, a professional reading. That resource-shelf role belongs to a sibling property and is not teacher.farm’s to build; the link from a pathway milestone to a resource at that property is the planned integration, not a resource library housed here. Planned
Who uses each part
The PD course catalog management and the PD hours rollup are HR-officer tools — an administrator or district administrator role. A studio or photography rep is hard-denied at the gate; these surfaces never appear in a rep session. The catalog is also readable by a staff member looking at available offerings to register for — the registration is self-service, but capacity and window gating are server-enforced, not a field a user can bypass.
The onboarding candidate pool is an adviser or administrator view within the staff cockpit. It shows school members not yet placed in a publication or role. For teacher development purposes, this is the new-hire pool: the administrator sees who has been onboarded into an induction cohort and who has not, using the same cockpit surface the publication masthead adviser uses to see who is on staff.
The mentor/mentee pairing and induction pathway surfaces — when they ship — are role-scoped by design. A mentor reads their caseload (their paired new teachers) and nothing else in the pairing system. A new teacher reads their own pathway progress. A department chair or administrator reads the cohort view. No staffer can read another staffer’s pairing record or pathway progress.
Student data does not touch any of these surfaces. The staff development layer is staff-coupled and census-neutral — it records staff professional-development facts, not student education records. The privacy wall that keeps a student record inside one school does not apply here because there is no student data involved; the staff record carries staff PII only, held by the same tenant isolation that covers the rest of the platform.
What teacher.farm is not
Teacher development and teacher management are not the same thing. The compliance ledger — the PD-hours tracker that feeds a state-renewal submission, the evaluation cycle a department chair drives, the credential expiration alert an HR officer acts on — belongs to a sibling property built for exactly that purpose. Teacher Farm is the growth journey that runs alongside the compliance record: the mentorship relationship, the induction pathway, the development arc. It reads the same PD hours the compliance ledger reads, because they share the same data layer. But its frame is the person growing into the profession, not the HR officer closing a compliance gap.
Teacher Farm is also not a resource shelf. A new teacher on an induction pathway needs classroom-ready materials — lesson templates, procedure guides, professional reading. That library is a separate property built for sharing and reuse. Teacher Farm links to it from a pathway milestone where relevant; it does not host a resource library of its own.
And Teacher Farm is not a community editorial. The cross-border staff community, the practitioner forums, the professional-learning-network layer — those are editorial and community surfaces that belong to community-oriented sibling properties. Teacher Farm is operational: a structured, workflow-backed development layer for the specific people a school has hired and is responsible for growing.
FAQ
Common questions
Does a school need to run the PD catalog to use the induction pathway?
Yes. The induction pathway is built on the PD catalog: pathway milestones are catalog offerings, and the hours they carry roll up through the same PD summary that feeds credential-renewal tracking. A school that is not yet using the PD catalog would run it for induction first and extend it to renewal PD from there. The catalog setup is the one-time step; the pathway is built on top of it.
Can a mentor be at a different school than their mentee?
The current design scopes the mentor/mentee pairing to the school the new teacher is rostered at — mentor candidates are drawn from the same school’s staff roster. Cross-school mentoring, where a mentor at one school holds a caseload of new teachers at other schools in a district, is a planned capability the data model supports but the workflow surface has not yet surfaced.
Is this a separate product or part of the same platform?
It is the same platform. The staff roster, the PD catalog, the PD hours rollup, and the onboarding candidate pool are all built modules on the same shared data layer that the rest of the school management platform reads. Teacher Farm is the development-and-mentorship face of those modules: a distinct product property with its own positioning, running on infrastructure the rest of the platform already provides.
Do PD hours logged through an induction pathway count toward license renewal?
The system records the hours and which credential they count toward — that determination is set by the school or HR officer when the activity is logged or when a pathway offering is configured. Whether the state’s licensing authority accepts those hours is a state-specific determination outside the system. The PD summary provides the auditable log; the school submits it to the relevant authority under whatever process the state requires.
What happens if a mentor leaves mid-year?
The pairing record is managed by an administrator. If a mentor leaves the staff roster, an administrator reassigns the caseload to another experienced staff member. The new teacher’s pathway progress and PD hours already logged are preserved — the milestone and hours record belongs to the new teacher, not the mentor. The pairing is a relationship record; the progress record is independent.
Is there a cost to use this?
Pricing and checkout are not available through this property today. Contact us to discuss availability and what a school’s situation looks like.
Related properties
Educator Resource Center
The resource shelf teachers pick up and use: lessons, templates, and classroom tools ready to go.
Educator Management Tools
The certification, PD-hours, and evaluation tracker — the compliance ledger that sits alongside the development journey.
Educator Tips
Short, practical teaching tips from working educators: classroom management, lesson shortcuts, and parent communication.
What is built and what is honest about early access
The PD course catalog (create, list, register, complete, cancel, roster), the staff roster with roles, the staff cockpit and its onboarding candidate pool, and the PD hours rollup are built today. The HR compute layer runs; the Prisma persistence binding that connects the PD summary and credential tracker to a live database is in progress. The mentor/mentee pairing workflow and the induction pathway object — the pieces that turn the shipped catalog and roster into a structured first-year development experience — are early access: data models designed, workflow surface being built. We do not present a development roadmap as a shipped product. We name what exists, what is being wired, and what is coming, and we let a school decide whether the current state fits their timing.