Standard 3.3 Induction, Mentoring, and Coaching

The Nebo School District enjoys a robust mentoring program for teachers in their first three years. It begins with a series of paid orientation and induction days for all newly hired teachers. These trainings cover important topics like pedagogy, educational technology, and district-specific expectations. From there, teachers are handed off to their school-site mentors. These mentors work with, observe, advise, teach, scaffold, train, serve, and support their assigned early-career teachers. This includes hosting monthly meetings, facilitating the new teachers' observing experienced teachers in our and other schools, observing and providing feedback to the new teachers, etc. Many outsiders who view or experience our induction and mentoring program are amazed and frequently comment, "Now that is how to do it right!" This artifact is a link to the district mentoring website.

PHS has a digital coach who is assigned to work with our faculty and staff. This year (2020-2021) our digital coach is Bryce Bird. He sends out weekly emails containing useful "tech tips," meets with teachers on a one-on-one basis to help them improve their integration of technology in a way that is pedagogically sound, and helps to organize faculty trainings on technology topics. During the COVID pandemic, Mr. Bird has been invaluable. In the spring of 2020, all of our teachers, including those who felt insecure with their technology know-how, had to turn their courses into online-only courses. Mr. Bird spent countless hours providing both school-wide training and one-on-one help. As the pandemic progressed into the 2020-2021 school year, he continued his heroic efforts to assist our teachers in providing an outstanding blended learning experience for our students.

At the start of the 2020-2021 school year, our leadership team was very excited to implement a peer observation and feedback program. The plan was to utilize a Power Hour once per month in the following way: Teachers would spend one prep period observing a peer teacher. They would then use the after-school Power Time on a Wednesday to meet with, debrief, and discuss what they observed, as well as to comp the lost prep time. We trained the faculty on how to do this. (An example of our initial faculty training can be seen here.)

As the school year progressed, we found that teachers were overwhelmed providing quality instruction both for their in-person students as well as their many absent and quarantined students. As a result, we changed the peer observation program from being required to optional. Wednesday Power Hour has become an important time for teachers to close their doors and develop online curriculum for quarantined students. We look forward to next school year when we can fully implement this peer observation program, which we believe is an important tool for fostering collegiality and professional growth.