What if We Haven't Completed Goal Setting Yet?

Three words: Just do it. Even if you are goal setting in January, it is always worth it to set goals for your work together. I'd recommend that the goals you set now focus primarily on your intended work together for the remainder of the academic year while taking into consideration your mentee's goals from the start of the year.

Creating Challenge

With the holiday season and a few weeks of much needed rest behind us, this is the perfect time to raise some mentoring conversation topics that create challenge in our work with our mentees. November is perhaps the worst month to take on such an approach - new teachers are often exhausted then, and usually only a day ahead of their classes. The holiday break brings quite a bit of rejuvenation.

Just today, I met with a first-year teacher and he was really happy with how his week was unfolding. He told me about how he was able to reflect on his classes over the break and how he wanted to change them to make them more engaging. As he put it, "I had an epiphany! I was bored in my classes, so my students HAD to be bored in my classes! I've decided I can do something every day to make the content I'm teaching much more engaging. We're doing hands-on activities outside, I'm doing demos more often, we're playing games to learn vocabulary, I'm working on making every wall in my room inviting and about learning. My students love it - and I'm happy today!"

Now with this type of motivation, my mentee was energized to hear about next steps he could take with his room set-up, more challenging approaches to weave into his vocabulary instruction, additional curriculum guides that could extend his hands-on lessons.

So what are some of the steps we can take to create challenge in our work with our mentees?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Dig into looking at student case studies. Look at their student work. Suggest next steps for mentees to reach out to the students' families. Note the questions that come up in your conversations and write them down on a Collaborative Log to follow up on finding the answer. Propose readings related to each case study student's learning needs and share insights together. Link mutual learning to future lesson planning and steps towards appropriate teaching strategies to differentiate instruction.

• Reflect on goals together. Rather than simply reflecting on how successful your mentee is at meeting his or her goals, work together to refine the goals towards more precise next steps. Of course, we celebrate any and all accomplishments that have been made thus far in the year, but the added layer of challenge keeps newer teachers inspired to continue to learn and grow.

• Design an Inquiry Action Plan. Action inquiry provides an opportunity to focus on a key question a teacher may have about a change he or she plans to make in the classroom. Together, you'll decide what kinds of evidence you want to gather to shape answers to that question over time. It's the perfect opportunity to encourage a mentee to try something in the classroom that he or she will stick with and reflect on using such evidence as classroom observation notes, student work analysis, assessment results, and lesson plans.

• Analyze Student Work. This is perhaps the most powerful approach to learning about what students specifically need to enhance their learning. It is a natural springboard towards a mentee making instructional decisions to meet those learning needs.

I find January to be an inspiring month for our work as mentors. It is a time of the year when the work becomes increasingly rich and focused on refining practice.

It would be fun to hear some of your January stories - and some of the successes you have accomplished along the way.

Thanks for reading!

-Alison.

What should I be doing with a Year 1 mentee vs. a Year 2 mentee?

Essentially the same thing in terms of the use of the FAS coaching model - but with different content - the content gets generated by your mentee and the conversations you have together. At the start of the year we focus on building relationship, reviewing class data, getting to know school and community resources, choosing case study students (2 of them - one language learner student and one special populations student, ideally) and goal setting. By now, if you started with your mentee at the start of the year, you are probably moving into inquiry work - observing, lesson planning, and analyzing student work.

Observing

Observing in our mentee's classroom is one of the single most effective routes to learning focused conversation topics. Even spending only ten minutes in a mentee's classroom will ground us in a clearer reality of their situation - how he or she moves in the room, the names and faces of actual students, the nature of questions asked, how the time is spent, how often students are engaged, how the room is arranged - in truth, the list goes on and on. I encourage getting into every mentee's classroom at least once a month. Without this layer of experience, we are grounding our work in hypothetical conversation and planning, rather than taking it to the level of how the planning is being actualized with living, breathing learners in real time.

I've had the pleasure of co-observing with mentor colleagues in the last few weeks. In doing so, I've learned a bit about my particular observation style, which is to capture as much relevant data as possible to share with the teacher I'm observing. I always go in with an observation focus, and then keep my eyes and ears pinned on the words, phrases, questions, and actions - on the part of both the teacher and the student - that link to the focus. It's impossible to capture everything, so having a focus is essential.

I find that at the onset, I often sit at a table or desk and rely heavily on listening - focusing on the page I'm writing on (I never type) and what is going on between teacher and student verbatim. I look up to record the time, so there is data on pacing, and to get a snapshot of the nature of student engagement. In time I begin to walk the room, looking over shoulders, capturing what students are saying in groups or writing on assignments. I ask students questions. All of this ends up painting a picture of a class period with lots of specific details.

The beauty of this approach is that a mentee takes a look at non-judgmental, detailed evidence based observation notes and the reaction is always "Oh wow! That happened. I didn't realize. Instead of doing ______, I could try __________." Or, "This is really interesting to see how this group of students were working together. And I got to them 5 separate times. I'll bet that made a difference." Hopefully you get the picture - the notes are a springboard for them to SEE themselves and their students from a bit of a "distance" and to reflect spontaneously. I never, ever launch into a whole bunch of feedback about what I think after an observation. Rather, we review the notes together and the reflection begins to roll. Then, after the teacher has an opportunity to reflect, I add feedback as well as ask questions to push his or her thinking. In this way, learning happens.

I've been asked, "How do you manage to write all of that down?!" Practice. Lots of practice. The surest route to developing the skill of taking observation notes is by taking observation notes. It's certainly true that getting in to observe often enough to have regular practice, especially if you have only one mentee, can be a challenge. I'll put it out there that it may be worthwhile to look for alternate situations in your life where you can sit back and simply practice writing observation notes. Sit in a cafe and write down as much as you can, with a focus in mind, for 15 minutes. Try it at a sporting event, at a bookstore, at a staff meeting, at an after school program - you name it. Doing this in 15 minute chunks again and again will develop the skill set for capturing detailed observation notes. Why would we want to do such a thing? Because for each and every teacher I've ever observed, receiving detailed notes of their classroom in action is priceless. They rarely ever get it.

If you haven't had a chance to observe your mentee yet, pull out your calendar the next time you meet and find a few windows of time for you to observe. It will broaden and deepen your work together naturally.

Thanks for reading - more on observing to come!

Alison

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.