General News
Mentoring program changes again
Nov 15, 2007 10:58 AM
What goes around comes around. From a district-run school-based model of professional development to three years of administering mentoring programs run by full-time staff out of the ill-fated regions, the Department of Education is returning to the school-based, peer-to-peer system of training and acclimating first-year teachers and other staff whom the UFT has long sought to support.
“We now have a program in place systemwide where mentoring of new staff is done colleague-to-colleague, by members of a teacher’s own school community,” said Aminda Gentile, UFT vice president for education issues.
The union has always advocated for school-based mentoring.
“Now we have to ensure the DOE makes it work right,” Gentile said.
Where possible, teachers are mentored by colleagues with the same certification or license.
“The UFT always insisted that real mentoring was done collaboratively and that it had to be non-evaluative and nonjudgmental,” said Gentile, director of the UFT Teacher Center. “Mentors cannot be supervisors. They’re not there to take names or keep scores.”
It’s not just their work in the classroom for which new pedagogues are being assisted.
“New teacher induction is key. The DOE finally gets that if they want students to achieve and the best teachers to stay, new staff have to have practiced hands helping move their instructional work forward while they are made to feel connected to the school learning community,” Gentile said.
It’s also not supposed to be done haphazardly. Every principal is accountable, and every school is required to have a New Teacher Induction Committee, composed of the principal (or the principal’s designee), the UFT chapter leader (or designee) and a majority of teachers. Schools are also required to submit a School-Based Mentoring Plan to the DOE.
UFT Teacher Center staff member Carol Haupt, who serves as UFT liaison for mentoring to the DOE, noted that the school-based mentors get “mentoring,” too.
“Every network in every school support organization has a lead instructional mentor, made up mostly of UFT members who served as full-time mentors under the previous mentoring model,” Haupt noted.
“Plus, the UFT Teacher Center is providing citywide professional development for the school-based mentors and is also collecting data from the field to see just how well the new model is being implemented and working.”
How does it look so far?
Haupt cautioned that the union won’t know for sure that new members are indeed getting quality mentoring until reports from chapter leaders are all in. A recent e-mail blast from Gentile to chapter leaders requested that information about any eligible new teachers not receiving appropriate mentoring or about schools with inadequate mentoring plans should be sent to her immediately. The union plans to use the reports to once more prod the DOE to get it right.
“Because of the changes in the model this year, we are concerned that program implementation was delayed and our newest members were not matched with mentors in a timely fashion,” Haupt said. “September and October are always the crucial months for new teachers to receive support.”
