Do you have a goal?

Today I attended a New Teacher Center leadership meeting, where a fellow mentor colleague shared the story of a successful year of mentoring with a first year teacher. Their work together resulted in significant student gains, with 80% of the mentee's students reading at grade level by the end of the school year. At the start of the school year, most of the students were reading well below grade level. These gains aligned directly with the mentee's professional goals for the year.

Here's the point for those of us in a new teacher mentoring role: the mentor had a targeted goal for her work that aligned directly with the mentee's goal. These aligned goals on the part of both professionals kept the work right on target. At the end of the year, they were able to celebrate the resulting student successes together, and they had an understanding of how they got there as a result of their weekly reflection on student achievement and learning needs. This is what our work is ultimately about, and there is great satisfaction in realizing a stated goal.

In the coming days, I'm going to be sure to write up a specific goal for my work with each of my mentees that aligns precisely with his or her professional goals. It will be interesting to reflect on the results at the end of the year. I encourage you to do the same - and to share your outcomes here.

Thanks for reading!

Case Study Students

In my work with my mentees, we are increasingly focusing on case study students at this time. We chose our case study students back in September, considering initial class data as well as each mentee's interest in learning more about particular students in their classes.

In the choosing of the case study students, I always pull out the Pre-Assessment Iceberg - a FAS Coaching tool that is an excellent guide for thinking and sharing about each student in a very holistic way. I find the use of this tool to be helpful for me as a mentor, because it facilitates a discussion that will generate information about the students my mentee is choosing, as well as information about what my mentee knows and doesn't know about pre-assessing student strengths, language levels, academic performance, and learning needs. The use of the Pre-Assessment Iceberg also opens up a variety of entry points for further mentoring - the range of questions and areas of interest are consistently wide. My mentees are led to want to know much more about their case study students - they decide to talk to them more, get to know them, ask them questions about their learning, phone their parents to find out more about their case study student's home life and academic history. We inevitably decide to do some reading and research about each student's particular learning needs - and it provides avenues for me to share resources or suggest veteran teacher observations or professional development opportunities. Yes - it's true - all from the use of one tool! If anything, the use of the Pre-Assessment Iceberg presents an excellent challenge for mentors - the challenge of strategically planning upcoming meeting topics with our mentees and having an awareness of when to create an entry point for timely new learning on the part of our mentee.

As a result of getting to know more about each case study student, the natural outcome of the pre-assessment work is to make come instructional decisions. As mentor, it is my job to ensure that each of my mentees comes to this place in the work. While we will continue to get to know more and more about each case study student over the course of the year through interpersonal relationship building, it is also essential to get to know them through inquiry into teaching practice. This is the juncture I find myself at with my mentees at this time. Each of them is making instructional decisions about specific instructional strategies, modifications, and interventions that they plan to take in their classrooms with their case study students in mind. Of course, this involves lesson planning. It also involves my coming in to observe the plans in action - and student engagement and learning within the context of the plan - as well as follow up conversations with my mentees about the efficacy of the instructional decisions and pointed next steps for pedagogical improvements. We will also look at student work, with a lens focused on the case study student work in particular. The process of analyzing student work inevitably leads to differentiated lesson planning - and thus, the cycle continues.

Lesson plan, observe, analyze student work, lesson plan, analyze student work, lesson plan again, observe, lesson plan, etc. The inquiry cycle is not linear. It is truly cyclical and we make choices about which component of the inquiry cycle would be the most beneficial for our mentees' reflection on practice in the interest of student learning. The key three processes in the inquiry cycle are: lesson planning, observing, and analyzing student work. When the time is right we can build in an Inquiry Action Plan - but that is another topic for another post.

This is a rich time of year for learning together with our mentees.

How do I get additional hard copies of the FAS Coaching Tools?

Hard copies of the tools - including the shrink wrapped packets of them - are in the Make and Take Center at the new NTSD offices - 581 61st Street, Oakland at the corner of Shattuck Avenue. Electronic versions of the tools can also be emailed to you - contact your NTSD liaison for further assistance.