Give them Golden Time

I held a Mentor Forum this week. One of my mentor colleagues there shared her intention to offer her mentee an hour of "golden time" each week. By this she meant that she wants to attend fully with her mentee when they meet throughout the year. It can be easy for us to be swept away by our phones, emails, "to do" lists, and the hectic concerns of our teaching lives - especially if we share a common content-area prep with our mentee. Ironically, diving into such "to do" lists can often lead to our getting very little done.

My colleague realized that she needed to put all the "chatter" aside to provide her mentee with protected time to reflect on her classroom: her successes, her questions, her challenges -- as well as attainable pedagogical, personal, and professional next steps. In my experience, such focus in collegial mentorship does lead to concrete achievements on the part of teacher, mentor, and most importantly, students.

We are fortunate to have a simple tool to provide a clear architecture for our meetings - The Collaborative Assessment Log. This tool provides us with a straightforward means to support a focused, reflective conversation.

How do you use the Collaborative Log, and how does it support your work?