Description of a mentoring situation
You are being assigned as a mentor to a beginning teacher who has started his induction year at your secondary school 7 months ago. You have already had a couple of first mentoring sessions together.
One day, in the staff room during lunch time, your mentee explains to you that some students do not respect him, and some of them speak in class and he does not know how to deal with the situation.
He is very stressed and feels one of the reasons he is not handling the situation well is because he does not have sufficient time to prepare his lessons. He is teaching 3 different subjects to 7 different classes between the ages of 13 and 16, each with around 20 students. He has also volunteered to support the preparations for the upcoming school play.
Your mentee explains that a colleague in his department has told him to be stricter and more authoritative with a louder and deeper voice. But first attempts at doing this have gone wrong resulting in a confrontation with the students.
Your Headteacher has recently approached you and asked for an update on the progress made by your mentee as a parent recently phoned her complaining about the beginning teacher.
Your response
You are now entering into a mentoring session with your mentee.
What do you tell your mentee? What questions will you ask him? What information do you share with him? What will you address first, what last?
Think about some of the points made in this section and in the Conversation Map of TeachOntario and include these in your answer. Take a look at how others would approach this situation.
My response:
First, I would let him express himself and tell me everything he feels about it.
A. Phase of planning
Then, I would ask him to find some possible solutions he thinks that are appropriate for the problem.
The other step would be for me to propose him to design some alternative activities, in case the first ones do not work.
b. Reflecting
Afterwards, I would make a conversation on how it is natural to feel stressed, but that also every teacher may have felt this way.
C. Problem-solving + Reflecting
In the end, I would let my mentee try the activities he has planned and wait for our next communication and for the feedback.
No comments:
Post a Comment