A teaching assistant supports the lead teacher’s instruction, supervises students outside the classroom and handles the admin that keeps a school day running.
Teaching assistant duties fall into three buckets — instructional support, supervision and administrative tasks — and the mix shifts by school: an independent lower school, a Catholic parish school, a Montessori classroom and a charter campus organize the same role differently.
Here is what the job involves.
Instructional support
Instructional support comes first.
Teaching assistants reinforce the instruction the lead teacher delivers: working with individuals and small groups who need another pass at a concept, re-reading a passage, drilling math facts, sounding out new words or walking through a writing draft.
Assignments can be structured.
A school may ask the assistant to run a literacy or math station while the lead teacher works with another group, or to pull a small group for practice the teacher has planned.
What the support looks like shifts by grade.
An early childhood room may ask assistants to lead letter and number games, run learning centers and help with snack and coat routines.
A middle or upper school may place an assistant in a study hall, a writing lab or a specific subject department.
Assistants also work with students who need catch-up time: a student returning from an absence, a new arrival still learning the school’s routines, or an English learner who benefits from a vocabulary preview before a lesson.
Supporting students with disabilities is part of the work in classrooms that include them.
In 2020-21, 59.1% of private school teachers had at least one student with a disability in their classes, according to NCES’s National Teacher and Principal Survey.
The same survey found 12.9% of those teachers had a major, minor or certification in special education, and 56.4% had taken any coursework on serving students with special needs.
In classrooms like these, individual support is shared work.
The assistant reinforces what the lead teacher and any learning specialist or special education teacher plan, under the teacher’s direction.
The behavioral side of instruction sits here too.
Assistants keep students on task during independent work, redirect minor off-task behavior and support whatever classroom behavior plan the lead teacher runs.
The support runs through the materials as well.
Assistants adapt worksheets, set up manipulatives and centers, prepare scaffolds for students who need them and organize the room for the day’s lessons.
Assistants may also keep observation notes, track which students finished a task and run practice drills, giving the lead teacher a clear picture of where each student stands.
In schools that staff an associate teacher, the support sits closer to co-teaching.
The associate may lead parts of a lesson, confer with students during independent work and help plan, rather than only reinforcing afterward.
Supervision duties
Supervision is the second bucket: the unstructured time and transitions a school day is full of.
Assistants can be rostered for arrival and dismissal, hallways, the cafeteria, recess, study hall, class changes, field trips and before- and after-school care where the school runs a program.
The duty is active, not passive.
Whoever is on duty is expected to scan the space, hold headcounts, apply the school’s playground and cafeteria expectations, sort out minor conflicts and escalate anything that involves an injury or a bigger dispute.
Emergency procedures sit under this bucket too.
Expect to know the drill routines, the rules for leaving a room and who to call when something happens on your watch.
Supervision assignments come from the school’s duty roster, not from the job title.
Two assistants at the same school can carry very different supervision loads, so it is worth asking how duty time is assigned when you interview.
Supervision is also where assistants see a different side of students: how they handle unstructured time, friendships and frustration.
Teachers use that observational knowledge, so noting what you see on duty is part of doing the job well.
When a lead teacher is out or pulled into a meeting, an assistant may be asked to hold the room for a stretch.
A school may keep substitutes for that, or it may lean on its assistants.
Which it does is worth asking about before you sign.
Residential supervision is its own posted role at boarding schools.
NAIS’s 2025-26 data for its member schools lists dormitory supervisors as a separate support role, with median lowest and highest salaries of $43,000 and $60,000.
Admin tasks
The third bucket is the admin that keeps a classroom running.
In postings, look for it folded into phrases like “prepare materials”, “maintain records” and “support the teacher” — it can take a real share of the day.
Material prep comes first: running copies, laminating, setting up centers and labs, refreshing bulletin boards and displays, organizing supplies and getting devices or apps ready for a lesson.
Record-keeping is next.
Assistants help with attendance, lunch counts, homework tracking, filing student work and entering scores into the gradebook where the teacher directs it.
Grading has a boundary.
Checking routine homework, timing fluency drills or scoring a spelling test swap can sit with the assistant.
The grades that go on the report card and the comments that explain them are the lead teacher’s call, and schools draw that line in different places.
Family communication runs through the lead teacher.
An assistant’s observations feed the teacher’s emails and conferences, and a school may ask assistants to draft notes for the teacher to send.
The bucket widens on event days: testing logistics and proctoring support, field trip paperwork and headcounts, assemblies, and the classroom inventory that decides when supplies get reordered.
How much admin an assistant carries is set school by school.
Read the duty list in the posting, and ask in the interview how the school splits prep, records and supervision between the assistant and the teacher.
How teaching assistant duties differ by school type
The three buckets are the skeleton.
The school type decides the mix — and how close the role sits to lead teaching.
At independent schools, the role can carry the associate teacher title and sit close to the teaching track: co-planning with the lead, taking parts of lessons and working with the same students all year.
For pay, the figures we can cite are NAIS’s, whose 2025-26 data covers its member schools only.
Member schools reported median lowest teacher assistant salaries of $38,000 and median highest of $47,074 for the role — medians of each school’s lowest and highest salaries, not percentiles.
Teacher aides’ median lowest and highest salaries were $36,225 and $40,000 in the same data.
BLS gives the wider benchmark.
Private elementary and secondary schools employ about 9% of U.S. teacher assistants, and BLS’s May 2025 wage series for privately owned elementary and secondary schools puts the median at $37,090 and the mean at $38,750.
That series is a grouping by school ownership, and whether any charter schools are counted in it is not established.
Across all elementary and secondary schools, public and private together, the median was $36,990 (May 2025), against $36,780 across all industries for the occupation.
For the occupation overall, BLS counted 1,463,000 jobs in 2025 and projects little or no change (0%) in employment from 2025 to 2035.
Charter campuses run the same three buckets.
The difference is program structure.
Charter schools are public schools, so federal Title I rules reach them.
Where a charter runs a Title I-funded program, the rule covers every paraprofessional with instructional duties: any paraprofessional in a schoolwide-program school, or one paid with Title I funds in a targeted-assistance school.
Each covered paraprofessional must hold a high school diploma or equivalent plus either two years of college study, an associate’s (or higher) degree, or a passing score on a formal state or local academic assessment.
Translators and paraprofessionals whose duties are limited to parental involvement are excepted.
Duties on a charter campus mirror the same buckets, with the qualification rule attached where Title I applies.
The teaching assistant career guide covers the requirements by sector in depth.
Catholic, Christian and Jewish day schools run the same classroom core.
What changes is the frame around it: religion classes to support, school liturgies or lifecycle events on the calendar, and a mission that shows up in the way classrooms are organized.
In a Montessori room, the assistant’s support work around the lead guide is the prepared environment: keeping materials stocked and in order, moving children through transitions and observing without interrupting work.
The lead side of that model is the Montessori teacher’s.
Private special-education schools reweight the buckets toward individual support.
NCES’s Private School Universe Survey counted 2,011 private schools with a special-education program emphasis in 2021-22, 6.8% of private schools.
At schools with that emphasis, assistant duties lean toward practicing IEP goals with individual students, assistive technology and one-on-one support.
Whatever the setting, the way to read a posting is the same: what share of the day is instruction, what supervision sits on your roster, and what admin is yours.
Career information, not legal or employment advice — confirm duties and requirements with the school you are applying to and, for federal program rules, with the U.S. Department of Education.
Duties are set school by school