What factors prevent mentors from committing to the mentoring program?
What can I do, as campus mentor coordinator, to increase mentor involvement?
I feel like I'm about to embark on something that will truly improve teaching and learning on my campus. I met with half of our new teachers yesterday and I am so pleased with their enthusiasm and spirit. I hope their attitudes will reach the mentors and create a more collaborative program. Meeting them and absorbing their positive energy makes me feel even better about my data gathering strategies and how the data will help improve the mentoring program for them. Tomorrow, I will meet with my site supervisor and building principal to review the action research plan. Both of them are supportive of what I want to accomplish and believe in what we can do with the data we will gather.
My action research plan begins August 9th and will conclude in May 2011. I will begin by gathering qualitative data from instructional coaches and mentors regarding how mentors are chosen and what the individual department's expectations include. I will also discover the mentors' attitudes toward mentoring when I survey them during inservice prior to the start of school. Monthly written reflections submitted by new teachers and mentors will provide me with ongoing qualitative and quantitative data throughout the year. In addition, I will interview each new teacher/mentor pair once during the year to gather data about the issues they are addressing together, how often they are able to meet, where they meet (at school, on the phone in the evenings, email, etc.), and what factors, if any, prevent them from meeting regularly. I will conclude my research in May with a survey of both new teachers and mentors that will provide me with quantitative data about the level of participation on the part of mentors.
I will share my research data in weekly leadership team meetings with the instructional coaches and the building principal. In addition, I will post my findings and reflections on an existing new teacher/mentor blog every two weeks. As factors affecting mentor participation are revealed over the course of the year, they will be addressed and the effectiveness of the solution will also be reported as data. I will report my findings to the leadership team in May. By the end of the school year, it is my hope that we have a clear picture of the factors preventing mentors from committing to the mentoring program and how we addressed those factors. We will know which solutions were effective and which were not so that we can develop an improvement plan. The number of new teachers we retain at the end of the year will ultimately reveal the success of the program, and provide me with a foundation on which to continue improvement.
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I like your idea Emily, but I think that in today’s age of technology with teachers who are digital immigrants and those who are digital natives that it is not always the teacher with the most experience who needs to serve in the role of mentor. Maybe you could consider conducting a survey of the skills, strengths, and weaknesses of all the teachers and having co-mentor / mentees. An example could be pairing a veteran teacher who has strong classroom management skills with a new teacher who has strong technology integration skills.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the new teachers could submit their opinions anonymously of how much the mentoring actually helped. This might lead to more honest responses. Many times they are afraid of offending the "old guard". This might be true for mentors who don't want to be perceived as complainers as well. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteI think another measure of the success of your mentoring program would be how the new teachers have evolved in their teaching. Perhaps observing a few of them at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year would help you see their progress.
ReplyDeleteMy action research is about teacher collaboration as a whole, I would love your feedback.
http://tammysactionresearch.blogspot.com/