- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1557387
- First Name Helen
- Last Name Meyer
- Institution University of Cincinnati
- Role/Position Associate Professor Secondary Science Education
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Other: Education
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Project PIs / Co-PIs / Other Faculty/Staff, School and District Administrators
- Topics Preparing Teachers for High-Need School Districts
- Session Length 30 minutes
Goals
In this session I will introduce and have participants engage in materials we are generating to prepare new mentors for pre-service and new teachers. We will discuss how the surveys and scenarios open opportunities for mentors to identify their teaching priorities and mentoring priorities. Participants will practice dialogues to bridge their priorities with their mentee’s priorities.
Evidence
The UC MTF group of expert teachers have worked to adapt materials to develop easy to implement materials for mentors and mentees that provide opportunities for dialog in a on threatening manner. A working group of teachers did the initial search and development. The materials have now been tested with the full cohort of UC MTF teachers, other mentor teachers in their schools and two classes of pre-service teachers. The feedback from the testing has been used to clarify the materials and refine the scenarios. The goal of the survey and scenarios is to create opportunities for dialog and all groups the materials have been tested on have found them to provide personal insights and opportunities to share and compare ideas.
Proposal
In this session, I will present materials the UC MTF program (Expert Clinically-Based Teacher Educators- ECBTEs) have been developing as part of our Noyce grant. The ECBTEs in the grant are all highly experienced urban STEM teachers who regularly work with pre-service STEM teachers or induction teachers in the urban school district. A major activity of the grant is to create materials to prepare new STEM mentor teachers to work with pre-service and induction year teachers. We have modified a brief survey (based on the work of Battelle) which helps mentors and mentees to understand their teaching priorities. The survey provides the mentor/mentee pairs with common language to discuss teaching and leadership priorities. This can be used to support mentors to understand what drives decisions of their mentees and to provide a framework for expanding both individual’s practices. We will also share brief classroom scenarios narrated from the mentor perspective and the mentee perspective. We have used the scenarios to develop mentors priorities for providing feedback and guidance; and to understand mentees support expectations. We see these dual narrative scenarios as a way to bridge expectations of mentors and mentees.
