First-year teachers who have not had prior teaching experience are entitled to at least two periods per week of one-to-one mentoring, for a minimum of 40 hours in the first year. Your mentor will be an experienced colleague trained in the best ways to support you.
“Sometimes in whole-team meetings, new teachers can be reluctant to ask questions,” says Virginia Niles, the UFT Teacher Center and city Department of Education mentoring liaison. “When you have a mentor, you can ask those questions one-on-one.”
Participating in the mentoring sessions is required for your professional certification. It is time set aside for you to build a relationship with your mentor, who will offer confidential and nonevaluative support, says veteran ENL teacher Michele Fienga, the mentoring liaison at James Madison HS in Brooklyn: “It gives teachers a safe space where they can process and have a thought partner in the work.”
Elisabeth Heleba, an ELA teacher at James Madison who was Fienga’s mentee five years ago, says Fienga’s ongoing, nonjudgmental guidance was invaluable in her first year. “She would sit down and plan lessons with me,” says Heleba, who specifically sought guidance with pacing. “For me, I think the most important thing was learning how to pace out my lessons so that I achieved everything I wanted to within the semester.”
Arriving at your sessions with specific areas of concern will let your mentor know what help you need, says Candice Portalatin, a mentor and special education teacher at Myra S. Barnes IS 24 on Staten Island. If you are able to identify your own “growth areas,” all the better. “I’m not here to say, ‘Do A, B, C, D,’” Portalatin says. “I’ll say, ‘What is something you’d like to work on?’ And we’ll do a cycle of four to five weeks working on that goal.”
If you’re not entirely sure what help you need, that’s OK, too, says Portalatin. “First, breathe,” she instructs. Your mentor will take the reins.
“In the beginning of the year, it’s almost always classroom management,” she says.
You can treat your mentoring meetings as troubleshooting sessions, even (and especially) if you don’t fully understand what trouble you’re having.
Portalatin recently mentored a teacher who came to her after a lesson saying that she didn’t get the response she wanted from her students. “I realized that, from a student lens, it was not what would be engaging for her 8th-grade students,” says Portalatin. Portalatin helped her mentee tweak the lesson so that it started with the students doing a bit of research to acquire some background knowledge. “Then they were more engaged,” says Portalatin, because “they owned the lesson a little bit.”
Your first year may feel chaotic and bewildering at times, but eventually, as they say in sports, the game will slow down. Build your relationship with your mentor with the values of openness, honesty and a sincere desire to improve, and things will get better day by day.
Says Portalatin, “The mentoring program is so important because it lets teachers know that they’re not alone.”
The mentoring program, facilitated by the DOE in collaboration with the UFT, is just one way the union works to support new members.
Explore other resources for new educators in the UFT website.