3 things that you can do right now
Familiarise yourself with the assessment process,criteria and target setting advice, in place for your training provider, Appropriate Body or school.
Ensure you are aware of the expectations prior to supporting your mentee so that you know what success looks like at each phase or module of the training curriculum. You can get a nasty surprise if you think everything is going well until your first assessment point and then realise that there are a lot of criteria that have not yet been met.
Try to value and support the mentee's progress away from teaching and learning. Consider how they are developing as a professional who will be supporting a class by themself in September.
In this section
Demonstrate Impact
In this section we focus on:
- impacting on the learning and development of teachers
This section is relatively straight forward and simple. In the same way that ‘the fruits of your labours’ for your class come in the form of end of year data, your mentee is no different. Each training provider, Appropriate Body or school will have their own system for assessing the progress of mentees. Most providers now employ systems and software to track progress formatively, through targets setting, professional learning conversations, for example, with more formal summative assessments at the end of a placement or phase of the taught curriculum. Long gone are the days of large folders full of sheets of paper tracked against the Teachers’ Standards. The Teachers’ Standards are now used only as an end point assessment and providers will have their own methods of tracking progress against the central curriculum, appropriate for the stage of development. The provider’s central curriculum must be informed by the ITTECF. As a mentor, you will have a responsibility for tracking the progress of your mentee and raising any concerns that you might have during the year in which you are supporting them. In very simplistic terms, the ultimate demonstration of impact is your mentee having the ability to impact on pupil progress through their teaching. This is the overriding priority for both you and your mentee. As we have looked at in detail in each section of the TEMZ, there is far more to mentoring than just ensuring your mentee can stand in front of 30 children and teach effectively.
When agreeing to become a Teacher Educator, you are accepting and, hopefully, embracing the opportunity to impact on a fellow professional. It is important, just as with the pupils in our classes, that we are able to demonstrate the impact that we have had during our time with our mentee. Without that, it is very hard for either yourself or your mentee to feel much value in the process. Ensure you have a clear goal in mind for what you are hoping to achieve and make sure you have a robust way of measuring this.
We want our teachers to be resilient, confident and reflective practitioners who are ready to embark on an exciting career. Impacting on not just the learning of the teacher you are supporting, but also their own development as a professional, is harder to demonstrate or assess but has equal importance if we want to be the best mentors that we can. Consider this when assessing your own performance as a mentor. Are you impacting on your mentee beyond the realms of teaching and learning? If the answer is yes, then your mentee will be fortunate to be learning from you in the classroom.
Peer Mentor Handbook
This handbook from the Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania lays out the boundaries that should be in place between a peer to peer mentor relationship. It breaks down the skills and qualities the best mentors will need to have and – just as importantly – the things they might want to avoid.
Co Planning lessons: experience of mentors and beginning teachers
Chris Powell advocate the benefits of co planning lessons with mentees and outlines the findings of a case study in which two teacher mentors ann their student-teachers trialled the mentoring strategy of co planning lessons.
STEM Online CPD
These short, free online courses, hosted on the FutureLearn Platform are the perfect resource for anyone looking to find some self-directed learning platforms. There are programmes focussing on:
- NE700 Managing Behaviour for Learning
- NE711 Introduction into Assessment for Learning
- NE710 Planning for Learning: Formative Assessment
- NE714 Feedback for Learning
There are also subject specific courses at both primary and secondary level.
Mentoring in schools
Each chapter of this book by Haili Hughes summarises how you can support your mentee in meeting a particular standard of the ITTECF. Choose a standard that would support an area of development for your mentee.
Creating a culture where all teachers improve
"Having worked in a range of schools over 20 years, with many colleagues and having been privileged to visit numerous other schools, Tim Jump Clarke, thinks the importance of school culture is one of the key drivers that make a difference. Supportive, compassionate and challenging: encouraging and empowering all staff to be life-long learners: this is the type of culture I endeavour to promote and help flourish."
Teaching, Coaching and Mentoring Adult Learners: Lessons for professionalism and partnership.
Heather Fehring and Susan Rodrigues (Routledge, 2017)
This accessible book collates the experiences and knowledge of Teacher Educators from across the world. The book focuses on adult learners specifically and how best to impact on their progress. Each chapter is ‘rounded off’ with a provocation to stimulate professional reflection. If you are looking for an accessible starting point, this book is for you.
Teacher Professional Learning and Development
This free, online book from the University of Auckland, outlines how teachers can invest in their own professional development.
Adaptive Instructional Coaching
Instructional coaching is taking the professional development world in schools by storm. Yet it isn't a silver bullet. Careful consideration is needed to ensure coaches have adequate training. Also, when PD programmes are rolled out at scale, sometimes too much complexity is removed, meaning teachers receive a disempowering one size fits all approach.
This session explores how schools can ensure they have a consistent yet adaptive instructional coaching approach, which is underpinned by the science of learning and meets a teacher where they are.
Demonstrate Impact- Further Development
