The Active Mentor

Practical Strategies for Supporting New Teachers

Ron Nash

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412980500
• eBook ISBN: 9781452271194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"This book is for any school developing its own mentoring program or looking to improve an existing one. The program shows everyone how to take responsibility for helping newly hired educators develop into practitioners who continuously reflect on and improve their teaching skills."
—Kathy Tritz-Rhodes, Principal
Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn Schools, IA

"Ron Nash weaves storytelling and realistic dialogue to set the stage for what mentors should model for new teachers to help them gain the confidence they need. This should be required reading for all administrators, mentors, coaches, teachers, and professional developers."
—From the Foreword by Kay Burke

Connect with new teachers and help them thrive in the active classroom!

Successful teacher mentoring holds the key to fostering teacher retention and increasing the effectiveness and satisfaction of new teachers. Building on his previous books The Active Teacher and The Active Classroom, Ron Nash demonstrates how educators can build effective, active mentoring programs for new teachers.

Packed with strategies, anecdotes, and reflection questions, this resource goes beyond topics commonly found in coaching and mentoring books to stress the importance of training new teachers to employ active classroom principles that ensure student engagement and achievement. The author:

• Discusses the role of professional development in promoting teacher effectiveness
• Emphasizes the importance of creating and maintaining a schoolwide climate conducive to mentoring
• Illustrates the critical role of mentors in providing support to new teachers
• Demonstrates how to build strong personal and professional relationships between mentors and protégés

Now mentors can actively influence the next generation of teachers by promoting best practices for engaged learning and a lively classroom environment!

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1

The Need for Heroes

In my workshops around the country, I ask educators to remember and give some thought to memorable teachers from their past who alternately pushed and pulled, expected and inspected, stood their ground when it came to quality student work, and accepted no excuses on the road to developing talent, skills, and young minds. Having instructed workshop participants—themselves often new or aspiring teachers—to describe their teacher heroes, I listen closely and never fail to note the passion with which they tell their stories. In their discussions, they will invariably tick off a list of characteristics, beliefs, and actions that placed these remembered and revered teachers in the top tier of educators. Listening to these workshop participants share, I am always reminded that they understand that teachers matter, and the best teachers matter most.

Schools can be new and expensive; they can boast the latest in technological advances; they can be beautifully landscaped, ecologically sound, and replete with resources and materials—yet, as Whitaker (2004) reminds us, “without great teachers, the school lacks the keystone of greatness” (p. 9). And, good teachers do make a difference for students. In an analysis of studies in several states and districts, Haycock (1998) reaffirms what has always made sense to me: Effective teachers get more out of students than less effective teachers, and the gap widens with low achievers. In Tennessee, in 1996, research done by Sanders and Rivers (Haycock, 1998) showed that the most effective teachers showed student-improvement gains of 39 percentage points more than the least effective teachers when working with low-achieving students (Haycock, p. 3). In looking at the research on teacher effectiveness, Haycock also concluded that while content knowledge is critical, especially at the secondary level, it is most effective when combined with teaching skills (p. 6). A good teacher induction program ought to combine professional development focused on improvement of teaching skills with college courses or other training geared toward improving content knowledge.

In almost four decades in education, I have come to the conclusion that there are (at least) nine qualities shared by highly effective teachers. Having observed hundreds of classrooms over the past 16 years, these qualities seem to be present in classrooms where achievement and morale are high, where time and energy are not wasted, and where students respect their teachers and enjoy coming to school. In less-effective classrooms, these qualities are often lacking; and in those cases, the body language of students—and often teachers—runs the gamut from indifference to outright hostility. Referencing great teachers and highlighting what makes them powerful role models is useful in demonstrating for new—or veteran—teachers that to which they can aspire.

In the next few pages, I’ll explore these nine qualities. At the same time, I’ll begin to look at new teacher induction and mentoring in the context of these qualities by offering suggestions to administrators and mentors alike. I certainly don’t claim this list is in any way complete, but I do believe that exceptional teachers

1. Avoid the blame game and instead focus on affecting learning;
2. Anticipate what might happen, plan ahead, and work at perfecting procedures individually and collectively when possible;
3. Learn to listen, build quality relationships, and enjoy coming to school every day;
4. Understand that the students need to do 80% of the work done in the classroom;
5. Function as process facilitators rather than purveyors of information;
6. Work on improving student performance, letting the tests take care of themselves;
7. Provide a consistently calm and steady keel on which students can rely;
8. Commit to a personal and professional continuous-improvement process; and
9. Enlist humor as a motivator and encourage much laughter in the classroom.

Avoid the blame game and instead focus on affecting learning

I can remember entering many a faculty lounge in my earliest years as a teacher, and as much as possible, I avoided long sojourns there because of the negative commentary that (along with the smoke) seemed to permeate the atmosphere. On occasion, I fell prey to playing that game—blaming the parents, the students, the curriculum, the textbooks, the administration, and (always) the lack of time. The irony of spending my free time complaining that there was not enough time escaped me in those early days in the profession.

Jenkins (2003), says that blaming fixes nothing, allows those in charge to escape responsibility (as everyone tries to fix blame on someone or something else), and perhaps worst of all, it “stops the search for underlying causes,” meaning that what needs fixed remains broken, and badly needed progress is either slowed or stopped in its tracks (p. xxvi). In a collaborative and risk-free school culture, where teacher leaders are free—and indeed encouraged—to pursue practical solutions, no one has time for playing the blame game because they are too busy brainstorming ideas, solving problems, and improving instruction. Those school environments that are essentially isolationist and where a top-down management style is the rule, teachers may be left to solve their own problems (without the capacity to do that effectively) or simply ignore them—and play the blame game day after day.

Mr. Crandall, the fictitious principal whom we met in the Prologue, long ago abandoned isolationism and a top-down management style for one of collaboration, experimentation, and innovation. Trey, along with others who served as mentors, knew they could experiment and take risks based on a set of core principles in operation all year long. The fear that can permeate an autocratic schoolhouse environment and impede growth was markedly absent in that middle school. Shellie and the other new teachers were fortunate to be part of a collegial staff that included support personnel like teacher assistants, office staff, and custodians. It was the custodial staff in Shellie’s school that readily agreed to prepare her classroom first, along with those of the other new teachers, so that they could use July and early August to get everything arranged. Mr. Crandall knew that teachers who could get a good deal of the logistical preparation out of the way early on were much more likely to enter the school year in a positive frame of mind.

Teachers are much more likely to complain on a regular basis if the overall climate of the schoolhouse is negative and if regular support is lacking. New teachers entering this environment may begin to identify with the “negaholics” in the building, especially if October and November bring a deterioration of discipline in the new teacher’s classroom. Lacking a strong and effective support system, new teachers may try to find someone to blame for their predicament, or they may simply get so discouraged they leave the profession early.

Administrators would do well to make certain that mentors are chosen from among the ranks of positive teachers; mentors should not be chosen simply because they know the subject matter or because they have been in the school a long time and therefore know all the ins and outs of the building and culture. Administrators should also create an atmosphere where positive behavior is encouraged and modeled at the top. The object here is to swell the ranks of those who refuse to blame others and instead take responsibility for their own actions. One way to decrease the number of those who play the blame game is to spend a good deal of time with the faculty searching for root causes of problems and then solving those problems as part of a regular and predictable continuous-improvement process.

Anticipate what might happen, plan ahead, and work at perfecting procedures individually and collectively when possible

Great teachers do not waste time, nor do they react in an unpredictable fashion to what happens in the classroom. The best teachers I have observed over the years are those who take the first week of school to turn procedures into routines. Many superb teachers I know refuse to hand out textbooks or other subject-area materials until students practice over and over having structured and purposeful conversations with everyone in the class. Those teachers practice bringing students back to them with a visual signal until the kids have it down to a few seconds. In those classrooms, procedures for setting up, cleaning up, and lining up are practiced until they become routine. Before anything is said about history, reading, math, or science, students are primed and ready to function as members of an efficient and productive classroom culture in which they learn they can share and contribute constructively in an emotionally safe environment. This kind of procedural consistency can often be a powerful part of the total collective—and collaborative—school environment.

In 2008, I visited an outstanding school, Sanders Corner Elementary, located in Loudoun County, Virginia. While walking through the hallways with Principal Kathy Hwang, I observed groups of students walking quickly, quietly, and safely from one room to another. This procedure of moving in an orderly fashion was in evidence no matter where we traveled in the school for over thirty minutes.

This did not just happen, and it did not come about as a result of a memo or edict. Sanders Corner is a school with an active and effective leadership team dedicated to continuous improvement. Hwang related that in a brainstorming session concerning what could be improved, the teachers suggested the hallways were consistently noisy—something that had a negative effect on classes all over the building. Hwang did not prescribe anything by way of a cure; she simply asked the teachers to consider what they thought might be done about it. She realized that by reflecting on both the problem and possible solutions, her staff was fully capable of solving the problem on their own.

They came up with the idea of instituting a schoolwide procedure for making the hallways quiet, something that involved practicing walking quietly in the hallways for many days. On occasion, teachers would hear talking in the ranks, and they would simply turn around, stop the students with a hand signal, and point back toward the room. The students would turn around and go back, starting over again—this time quietly. Teachers did not shout, complain, or scold. They simply took the students back to the room, doing it all over again until they got it right. What I observed was the result of many weeks of work as part of an overall commitment to respectful behavior in the school.

Great teachers—and all the teachers at Sanders Corner Elementary—understand that positive and predictable results come from planning and thinking about what could go wrong; considering in advance what might happen; and in the case of this faculty, working together to find a common solution to what they agreed was a considerable—and common—problem. This requires frontloading, and while some teachers may come to this kind of proactive planning instinctively, others can come to it in their turn when collaboration and innovation are the norm in the schoolhouse. Sanders Corner principal, Kathy Hwang, and her entire staff work together in an atmosphere where the blame game is not acceptable and collaboration is the norm.

New teachers need to understand that the process horse comes before the content cart, and administrators and mentors can work with protégés to frontload their own classroom system with solid procedures, rules, and beliefs that can jump start a great year. This is why Trey and Mr. Crandall began to work with Shellie immediately; Trey met with her soon after she signed her contract, and the summer became far less apprehensive for Shellie and the other three new teachers because administrators, teammates, and her mentor, Trey, took it upon themselves to make her feel at home and anticipate questions and potential problems well in advance of the first week of school for students. Trey was a fantastic teacher, and he understood the value of frontloading the process with proper planning, but it was the system at the school that best served Shellie. Trey could have retired at any time, but the system at that school would take over and assist Shellie in her first years in the profession.

Once again, while great teachers may come to this frontloading process naturally, every teacher can work toward being proactive, using the summer to think about what might happen and what might arise over the course of the school year. Mentors can help new teachers reflect on the coming year as a way of surfacing issues that can be part of the planning process necessary to a smooth-functioning classroom.

Learn to listen, build quality relationships, and enjoy coming to school every day

Along the road in my professional journey, I had occasion to serve as a salesman and sales manager for a school yearbook printing company. On one rather memorable (in the way painful experiences can be memorable) occasion, I had spent the better part of 40 minutes presenting the highlights of our program to a school principal and his yearbook adviser. I had prepared what I perceived was a superb presentation that would captivate and engage them, and ultimately result in my getting the contract for the following year. I had spent a good deal of time the night before constructing a great plan that could not help but succeed, and I let it rip for those 40 minutes. When I was done I was exhausted, but confident I had made my case.

While I put away my displays and sample books, the principal and yearbook adviser went to his office to talk it over, and in a few minutes the adviser came back, thanked me for my presentation, and said the principal would like to see me. I walked confidently down the hall, and his secretary took me in to meet with him, shutting the door on her way out. He began by saying, “You did not get the contract for next year, but I like you, so I’m going to tell you why and give you some advice.” He went on to say that in those 40 minutes all I did was talk. I did not try to get to know him or his year-book adviser. I did not even ask what they wanted in a yearbook program. I had made no attempt to build any kind of relationship. Finally, there were a great many things in what I had offered that they could not afford and/or did not want, but I had not taken the time to find out what they did want or need. In short, I simply did not listen. I did not ask questions. I made no attempt at building a relationship. I just talked for 40 minutes.

I learned a valuable lesson from that experience relatively early in my sales career, and the lesson carried over to my reentry into teaching a few years later: Even the best-designed lesson plan can’t overcome the absence of relationship building, and this applies in teaching as it applies in sales. To put this in very practical terms, no one will buy what you’re selling until they buy you. Salespeople and teachers who ignore this basic principle will see otherwise beautifully constructed plans fail for a lack of planning in the all-important building of meaningful relationships. Part of putting the process horse before the content cart involves foundational relationship building that ensures students are in the right frame of mind for the content they know will follow. Great teachers learn to do far more listening than talking.

Bondy and Ross (2008) affirm that, especially when it comes to high-poverty schools, well-designed lesson plans are not enough if students are not engaged (p. 54). Rather than waiting and hoping relationships magically develop in the classroom, great teachers build relationships deliberately and work to get to know students on a daily basis and in many seemingly small, but effective, ways: “A smile, a hand on the shoulder, the use of a student’s name, or a question that shows you remember something the student has mentioned—these small gestures do much to develop relationships” (Bondy & Ross, 2008, pp. 55–56).

The (relatively few) great teachers and professors from my past made the time to get to know me, and they paid attention to my talents and to what I enjoyed doing. These teachers stand out in my mind because they cared about me and demonstrated that with what they said and did; their actions supported their words. Mentors need to spend time with their protégés reflecting on the qualities of their own great teachers. It may be that these outstanding educators inspired the protégé to become a teacher in the first place. It is not difficult to imagine that what new teachers see in their heroes is that to which they aspire. Uncovering those natural aspirations as part of a reflective process may well serve as a good starting point for mentors who desire to develop their own personal and professional relationship with the protégé looking to them for support. Mentors need to be as proactive in developing relationships with new teachers as new teachers are in developing relationships with the students in their care.

Over the years, I have seen enough negative teacher attitudes to convince me that negativity is as destructive as it is contagious. There are people who have the ability to drain a meeting or classroom of every positive aspect; I call them the negaholics. They drag themselves to school every day and admittedly (and vocally) wish they were somewhere else. The antidote to this malady is a schoolhouse climate that is pervasively and consistently positive; it is an environment that does not give in to the negaholics and eventually either changes them, neutralizes them, or chases them away.

New teachers need mentors who love coming to school every day; they need mento...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. The Need for Heroes
• 2. The Need for Speed
• 3. Clarity and Substance
• 4. Ramping up Relationships
• 5. A Place for Everything
• 6. Everything in Its Place
• 7. When Good Gets Better
• 8. Perspiration and Inspiration
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Support From an Extended Family
• References
• Index