Beginning teachers in any system need an experienced, knowledgeable mentor to help them navigate their first years in the classroom. Effective mentors play a critical role in a district supporting and retaining great teachers, and the mentor teacher role is an important component of the leadership pipeline for systems that want to retain and support homegrown talent.

Today’s beginning teachers need the support of an expert mentor more than ever as they work through the challenges of designing virtual curriculum and managing their unique classroom environments.

Learning Forward’s Mentor Teacher Academy is a customized, multi-day, blended learning experience grounded in a Mentoring Cycle of diagnosing mentee needs, providing coaching support to address those needs, and monitoring progress to measure growth and evaluate impact utilizing a “Plan, Do, Study, Act” process for growth and improvement.

We help mentor teachers develop skills and strategies to:

• Build strong relationships and effectively communicate with beginning teachers, including providing ongoing support in a virtual space;
• Apply adult learning theory and understanding of new teacher mindset to the mentoring role;
• Apply a mentoring cycle grounded in relationship-building and communication strategies;
• Diagnose and prioritize beginning teachers’ strengths and areas for growth in the areas of classroom management, instruction, and content-specific pedagogy;
• Design and implement a mentoring support plan to develop beginning teacher knowledge and skills and appropriately differentiate coaching strategies;
• Monitor beginning teacher progress and determine next steps for ongoing mentoring;
• Deepen their own content knowledge and content-specific pedagogy in order to support new teachers’ instruction and appropriate use of formative and summative assessments;
• Support beginning teachers in using culturally responsive teaching techniques and understanding the unique needs of the students and families they serve.