You might have more capacity in your room than you're using. Here's how to tap it.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about how paraprofessionals entered many classrooms: as a response to pressure rather than a plan.

Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills at the OECD, described it bluntly in a recent interview. In England fifteen years ago, teachers raised concerns about disciplinary problems and feeling unable to do justice to their students. The government's response was to provide a teaching assistant for every teacher — and reduce teaching hours accordingly. "But fifteen years later, teachers are not any happier. They have not seen any reduction in their stress. They have seen their work becoming more monotonous... They've lost contact to many students who need [them] the most."

This is not a criticism of paraprofessionals. It's a criticism of the logic that adding bodies to a system automatically improves it, without attending to how those people are integrated into the work. Of course, Mr. Schleicher was not specifically commenting on the teacher-para relationship moving forward, but the content caught my attention.

The teacher-para relationship could be one of the most consequential professional partnerships in a school — and one of the least systematically prepared for. Research consistently finds that most teachers receive little or no formal training in supervising or collaborating with paraprofessionals. A national survey of teacher preparation programs found that over a third include no coursework on the topic at all. Most teachers and paraprofessionals are placed together without a shared onboarding, without explicit role conversations, and without communication structures that let them function as a coordinated team rather than two separate adults operating in parallel. They figure it out through goodwill and improvisation, and many of them do. But goodwill and improvisation leave a lot on the table — for the students, for the teacher, and for the para.

This post is about building the scaffolding that turns a good working relationship into a genuinely productive partnership. Not fixing something broken. Building something better.

– The Shift

The shift this post is proposing is from presence to partnership.

A para's presence in your room is a given. Partnership requires something different: shared understanding of what each person is trying to accomplish, clear agreement on who does what and when, and an actual channel for communicating what each of you is noticing about the students between you.

The difference matters most for students. When a teacher and para are genuinely coordinated, the students who need the most support get two sets of eyes, two sets of observations, and two people who are talking to each other about what they're seeing. When they aren't, those students get parallel, sometimes contradictory care — and often, less direct access to the person with the deepest instructional expertise in the room.

Partnership also matters for the adults. The relationship between a teacher and para is a professional relationship. It has its own dynamics, its own power structure, and its own failure modes. Most teachers were never trained to supervise another adult. Most paras were never trained to function as a collaborative partner rather than a passive support. Both of them got placed in the room together and told to figure it out.

The framework below is my attempt to reduce the amount of figuring out required.

– The Framework

Step 1: Name the Roles (Once, Together)

The most common source of friction in teacher-para relationships isn't personality conflict. It's role ambiguity. It’s the absence of a shared understanding of who does what, who decides what, and how disagreements get resolved.

This conversation doesn't need to be formal or lengthy. It needs to happen. Some questions worth covering explicitly:

• On instruction: How do we each want to handle moments when a student needs more support than whole-class instruction is providing? Are there moments when the para leads a small group independently, and if so, what does that look like?
• On behavior: What's our shared approach to behavioral redirection — and how do we signal to each other when we need backup? What's the approach when you'd handle something differently?
• On specific students: What does each of us notice about specific students that the other might not see — and how do we make sure that information actually reaches each other?
• On the relationship itself: How will you raise a concern with each other? What's the best time and format for that conversation?

You don't need to agree on everything immediately. You need to make the conversation normal rather than avoided.

Step 2: Build a Minimal Communication System

Most teacher-para communication happens in the margins of the day — a whispered exchange during independent work, a note left on a desk, a hallway conversation that gets interrupted. This works fine for routine information and completely breaks down when something important needs to be communicated.

Choose one of the following based on your context. The right system is the one you'll actually use:

• Option 1: The Three-Minute Bracket. Three minutes before students arrive, the teacher states the day's key priorities and any student-specific flags. Three minutes after students leave, the para shares one observation that the teacher might have missed. This is low-overhead and high-value. The structure keeps it from falling off the agenda.
• Option 2: The Physical Note Card. A shared index card on the teacher's desk that either person can add to during class. "Jaylen seemed to understand the concept once we tried the visual." "Maria was distracted from 10:15 onwards — something happened at lunch." This creates a running record without requiring synchronous communication.
• Option 3: The End-of-Week Five. Five minutes on Friday where each person names one thing that worked well and one thing to try differently next week. This is less about day-to-day logistics and more about the relationship itself staying calibrated over time.

The goal isn't comprehensive documentation. It's closing the information gap between two people who are watching the same students from different positions in the room.

Step 3: Actively Use What the Para Sees

This is the piece most often skipped, and it's where the partnership becomes genuinely useful rather than just functional.

A paraprofessional working alongside students (especially in small group or one-on-one contexts) often sees things a teacher managing a whole class cannot. The student who understands the concept when it's explained differently. The student whose behavior in small group looks nothing like their behavior in whole class. The moment when a student was actually close to getting it, before getting frustrated and shutting down. The social dynamic that's affecting who's willing to participate.

This isn't about the para knowing students "better" than the teacher. It's about the para having access to a different angle of vision that, when it enters the conversation, makes the teacher's decision-making more complete.

Making this work requires two things.

1. Asking for it: "What did you notice about Marcus during the group work today?" is a question that signals the observation is valued and creates a norm of sharing it.
2. Adjusting based on it — which closes the loop and confirms that the information was worth providing.

Step 4: Think About Fading, Not Just Supporting

One of the most important questions about any student who receives paraprofessional support is: what does success look like, and does it involve needing less support over time?

This isn't always the goal. Some students have ongoing needs that require consistent support. But for many students, the aim is increasing independence, and the paraprofessional's role should reflect that. Proximity fading, gradually moving from close physical proximity to monitoring from a distance, and prompt fading, reducing the level of support provided as a student gains competence, are both evidence-based approaches that require deliberate coordination between teacher and para.

If neither adult has named this as a goal for specific students, the default tends toward constant support rather than graduated independence. That's worth examining.

Step 5: Advocate for Your Para

Paraprofessionals are doing increasingly complex instructional and relational work at pay that rarely reflects that complexity. They are rarely included in professional development. They are often the first to go when budgets tighten and the last to be considered when training is planned. Many have never received explicit preparation for the instructional support role they're being asked to fill.

This is a structural problem that no individual teacher can solve. What individual teachers can do is name it, advocate within their sphere, and refuse to take the gap in preparation for granted.

What does this look like? Include your para in relevant conversations, not as a courtesy but because their perspective improves the decision. If you encounter a PD opportunity that would help them, name it and advocate for access. When something they did worked well for a student, say so directly and say it to someone who can document it.

The relationship works better when both people in it feel like professionals. A teacher who treats their para as a professional tends to get a para who functions as one.

– The Honest Part

Great teacher-para relationships already exist in many classrooms. This post is about building the systems that make good relationships reliably productive.

It is also worth repeating that teachers and paras are usually placed together without adequate preparation for either of them, and the absence of structure in this relationship isn't a personal failure. We can’t solve the structural issues in this post, but we hope this initial framework will help close the gap. And if not, let us know!

– Your Move

Collaborate with your para and choose one communication system from the three options above. Try it for two weeks before evaluating whether it's working!

What's working in your teacher-para partnership — and what system or structure would make it even better? Let us know in the comments!

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This is part of Accingo's Collaboration Hub — practical frameworks for building teaching teams and partnerships.