On the screen, a prekindergarten teacher sat alongside three young students, working to help them identify and label pictures. In the audience, 48 teachers watched her intently, scribbling notes and nodding knowingly as the teacher spoke. When the video ended, the teachers huddled together in conversation, bouncing ideas around and highlighting their notes.

The teachers, who represented every school in District 12 in central Bronx, had come to the UFT’s Bronx borough office on Oct. 22 for the second in a series of eight full-day training sessions for mentor teachers. Thanks to a unique collaboration between the UFT, the Department of Education and the New Teacher Center — a nonprofit organization facilitating a professional learning series for mentors — they were learning how to record notes while observing new teachers to show evidence of student engagement.

“It’s a great way to make me really think about my practice,” said Vernae Bezear, an instructional coach and reading recovery teacher at PS 57. “Before, I understood the idea of being nonjudgmental when working with new teachers, but it was hard because I didn’t have the tools or guides to keep me focused. This keeps me grounded.”

As they debriefed, the mentor teachers discussed the evidence they had collected, striving to be specific and objective about what the teacher and her students had said and done during the lesson.

In the New Teacher Center’s model, mentors gather data through observations and enter their notes into a shared online portal their mentees can access, lending transparency to the experience for both parties. This year the model expanded to District 12, where UFT District 12 Representative Steven Goldberg and Superintendent Rafaela Espinal Pacheco have a strong working partnership, after a successful pilot last year in District 9.

“We don’t want mentoring to be the hours you enter into a computer and sign off on,” Pacheco said when addressing the mentors. “We want real, strategic coaching.”

To that end, school administrators and principals participate in training as well, with the hope that school leaders develop a common thought process about how best to select mentors from among their staff members and what the mentoring experience should look like.

“This is all about how we help teachers develop and get better,” noted UFT President Michael Mulgrew, who attended the training session. “We can’t keep telling teachers we want them to stay in our most challenging settings and not give them support.”

Just a few weeks into the school year, it was clear that the mentors’ support had already made a world of difference to the new teachers in their schools.

“Just to be able to sit with my mentee and develop that bond with another teacher is something you can’t explain,” said one mentor. “They feel like, ‘I have somebody to help me do better than when I walked in.’”