new teacher articles
Mentoring: It’s your right
Aug 7, 2008 11:26 AM
A new teacher's effective mentoring experience is crucial to student acheivement.
If you are a first-year teacher who has not had prior teaching experience, you are entitled to one-to-one mentoring throughout your first year.
“Mentoring is the most crucial piece of new teacher induction,” notes UFT Vice President Aminda Gentile. “It is not just a matter of helping a teacher master lesson plans. Ultimately, it is the key to student success.”
As a first-year teacher, you should have a mentor assigned to you in the first weeks of the school year. A mentor is an experienced teacher in your school or a recent retiree assigned to provide a minimum of two periods of collegial support weekly. While the administration and other people working in your school may be of assistance, your official mentor should be another classroom teacher or teacher working as a coach or lead teacher.
Your mentor has been trained extensively in ways to best support you (including doing demonstration lessons, co-teaching with you, offering suggestions about classroom management and helping you plan your lessons). Your mentor can help you diagnose student work and help you connect to people and instructional resources in your building. Your mentor supports you in the context of a collegial, nonjudgmental relationship where discussions are confidential and not reported back to your principal.
Though their primary focus is to guide new teachers toward enhancing their skills, mentors also help new teachers become members of their school community. They know the school and the school system and can make it easier for new teachers to adapt to a school’s unique culture and to a vast school system that can feel overwhelming for any new teacher, especially one who is new to the city.
Providing mentors for new teachers used to be the responsibility of the central Department of Education, but it has often fallen through the cracks since the DOE transferred that responsibility to principals. Many principals have put mentoring on the back burner and the union is fighting to keep the crucial peer-to-peer mentor teacher program from becoming an endangered species.
Every new teacher without prior teaching experience is entitled to an experienced and supportive mentor. If you believe you are eligible and have not been assigned a mentor by two weeks into the term, see your UFT chapter leader or send an e-mail to mentoring@uft.org.
