Mentoring Calendar: December

Here are some ideas for areas of focus and activities for December. You might consider structuring one of your regular meetings with your mentee to fit one or more of the goals listed below.

Personal

  • Monitor new teacher’s emotional state
  • Drop a note of encouragement into the staff mailbox – give a specific reference to an observed strength, success with a student, etc.
  • Connect new teachers with staff holiday gatherings both at school and outside of school. If none are planned, initiate a social event for the two of you.

Professional

  • Make some microwave popcorn and watch a videotaped teaching episode with the new teachers. Check your professional library – or check one out from the ESC curriculum library. Analyze the video using PSD’s Teaching and Learning standards rubric.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

  • Explain that the days before the winter holiday have the potential to be lost instructional time. Guide them in planning meaningful and engaging learning experiences while being mindful of the conflicting demands on student and family time outside of school.
  • Review student performance on common assessments and discuss strategies for insuring all students meet or exceed grade level expectations. Use student work to analyze actual student progress. This should be a collaborative process.
  • Review systems for documenting student progress and assist in revision or refinement as necessary. Use student work to analyze student progress. This should be a collaborative process.
  • Discuss alignment of instruction to state/district learning standards.

What is it that we want students to learn and how do we communicate this to them?

How do I monitor learning in my classroom?

What do I do instructionally when students aren’t learning or have already mastered a learning target?

Organizational Systems

  • Discuss the dilemma of the piles of papers that have accumulated on shelves, in boxes, and on the edge of desks.

Give a gift of a set of brightly colored folders or two or three new three-ring binders. Help the new teacher figure out what to recycle and what to keep, what needs to be grading carefully, what needs to have a teacher’s eye skimming, etc.

Give a gift of a collaborative grading session – offer to sit with a set of your mentee’s student papers and grade them together – this is a chance to focus on the purpose for the work and discuss the ‘next steps’ for learning for those students. By the end, he/she will have a set of papers graded and take away some things to think about in planning for future instruction.

Students

Advise your mentee that the holidays can be either joyful or stressful for students and that either emotion can negatively impact their focus on school and learning.

Remind your mentee to be sensitive to the religious and ethnic diversity of the students so that they will not make references to only the celebrations in which they participate.

Let your mentee know not to penalize students for decisions made by adult family members about school attendance by giving high stakes assessments the day before the school holidays.

Colleagues

  • Ask your colleagues and administrator(s) to assist in providing moral support to new teachers in your building who are going through the slump and need personal and professional support. Let them know they are valued personally and professionally.

School and School System

  • Go over policies for holiday decorations, celebrations, and gifts.
  • Preview semester grading policies and procedures.
  • Provide an overview of end-of-semester or mid-year assessments and procedures.