Mentoring and Clinical Fellowship — Supporting Your Colleagues

This year Mindy Karten Bornemann, Carmen Alvarez, Carol Haupt from the Teacher Center and Kathy Bocchino from the DOE New Teacher Induction and Mentoring program have been working together to pilot a new mentoring program. Many of you have told us that you would prefer a mentor who is someone from your field, not a classroom teacher. If this is your first year, according to the State Education Department you should be mentored so that you can then obtain your license of Teaching Students with Speech and Language Disabilities.

Our chapter has also proposed that those who want to obtain their Certificate of Clinical Competence can also receive mentoring hours during the clinical fellowship year if the clinical supervisor holds the certificate from the American Speech and Hearing Association and is a speech teacher who is approved for mentoring. Our UFT contract (Article 7 L2) indicates that the holder of the CCC may work with a clinical fellowship candidate so the person can obtain his or her own CCC. The clinical supervisor need not be a speech supervisor.

Many of our speech supervisors are already helping our members do their clinical fellowships and can’t take on any more candidates. In the past, the holder of the CCC worked with candidates on varying days of the week so that the students in their own programs did not miss many therapy sessions. Of course, it would be ideal if the Clinical Fellowship Year supervisor and the CFY candidate were located near each other so that traveling time would not be an issue. We will contact your speech supervisor and with the help of the DOE’s Judy Manning try to coordinate such arrangements.

Please complete the survey if you are a first year speech teacher and need mentoring or are ready to begin your CFY. There are also opportunities for senior and junior staff to be a mentor or to be mentored. Any member of the speech chapter who has five years of experience as a licensed teacher of speech improvement and meets the selection criteria listed in the mentoring posting may apply. You can attach a letter of intent with the survey. If you are a new teacher and already have completed the form, you need not do it again.

Our chapter is also trying to re-institute our very popular speech chapter survival course. It will be given in different boroughs after school for P credit. More information will be sent to you after we receive your survey to see where to offer these courses. Thank you in advance for helping us with this important and collaborative effort.

Please volunteer.

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