Are you a teacher or school looking for mentorship?
Would you like to discuss how to: Navigating curriculums and inlcude best practices; How to build classroom community; How to embed autonomy within the structure of your day?
Even as a veteran teacher, I am learning how to improve as a teacher each and every year. Whether you have been teaching for 1 year, 10 years, or 20 years, there is always an area where you might want to improve or alter your practice a bit. Having been in the classroom since 2004, I pride myself on using my own lessons learned, knowledge and expertise to help guide, mentor and advise others. Here are a few examples:
I have been a mentor to a budding writing teacher, Sarah. We often met at a pancake house on Sundays for our mentor meetings. Sarah expressed how helpful it was when I helped her decide the best way to organize and structure her writing block and map out lessons. I also went into her classroom to model a writing lesson and individual writing conferences with her students. Mostly we often looked at actual student writing and used that to guide conversations around student strengths, weaknesses and how to use that to determine the next string of lessons. I provided many resources to Sarah that she still has today. We have remained in touch beyond our mentoring days. Over the years we have initiated some shared journal writing between our two schools. This activity helped build language and writing skills with her ESL students as a pen-pal type writing relationship.
I have been a mentor and advisor to several of my TFA (Teach For America) students. Outside of classroom content from their graduate school coursework, many of the students in the TFA program sought me out for advice and mentorship. As brand new teachers they often struggled with the management of day-to-day content, structure, and the behavior of their students. The advice I provided outside of graduate school coursework included:
How to create a structure within their main schedule
How to plan the many literacy components within their 90 or 120 min block of time
How to gain access to a variety of text
A variety of behavior management strategies
How to build classroom community
How to believe in yourself (when they felt like they were failing)
How to design authentic center work
How to avoid a pile of papers that become impossible to grade
How to achieve student success on achievement tests without “teaching to the test”
I’ve had the privilege of mentoring a beginning teacher on my middle school team. Early in her teaching career, I mentored Andrea in how to best teach lessons from the Junior Great Books curriculum. She talked about how valuable it was to learn my fishbowl teaching method, and how I structure a story and discussion across 5 instructional days. I also shared tips like how to incorporate a “hot seat” for those students who can't just sit on the sidelines.
Once the baton of teaching the constitution was passed from my plate to hers, I shared every resource I found or created. For many years, she kept all the resources in my room as a “filing place” and would help herself to the resources she needed as the time for the constitution test approached. Andrea still comes to me with all her new ideas and we talk together about how to bring them to life and make them a reality. It’s important to have a good thought partner when you are teaching. We have now worked together as a team for 8 years and counting. Even as an established teacher, she still seeks my advice on how to best craft an email response to a parent and I go to her for SEL tips with students. What started as mentorship on a team where we shared students, has blossomed into a friendship and teaching partnership that has kept me sane and motivated long into my own career.