This strategy of having strong rituals and routines is vital in our school environment. We have students who come from very unstable home situations and school is their safe place but they do not readily trust adults and processes until they are well established. Consistency is key and students thrive on routine. My mentee is having to re-establish this after coming in a month after the school year starts but she is doing a great job!

Agreed! My mentee and I both talked about this in our first meeting that we want to maximize our time together so we start with what is going well and then go into how she can feel more supported. We end with action steps and try to end on time so she can use her planning time to work smarter, not harder.

Absolutely! When you are new at anything and overwhelmed, you feel like you might be on an island by yourself and everyone else is handling it smoothly while you are completely freaking out. Allowing them a listening and understanding ear can hopefully help ground them and validate their feelings.

These ideas are great and I have tried to provide this type of support to my mentees. I am always considering balance of overdoing it when it comes to support. She has so many adults coming in and out of her room throughout the day for a variety of reasons and going in when I can to check on her would just be a distraction to the students and another thing. I am going to send her positive texts and emails to celebrate her successes instead of going in so often.

As mentors, we can guide our mentees into becoming professional problem-solvers by asking the right questions to guide their thinking on challenging curriculum or behavior issues. Getting creative with their decision making and growing their confidence in their own skills to problem-solve.

I have tried inviting my mentee to a variety of ed tech learning opportunities so that we can learn new teaching tools together.

I have definitely had "mentors" that have had this approach and this top down strategy is not at all helpful for me. I know that as a mentor I do not have all of the answers but that I am there to support and help my mentee figure out the answers together and provide resources they may not have yet.

From the top down, when staff and students are given choice and feel like they are a part of a democratic society in their school, they will have more buy-in to want to show up, belong and feel that they matter. This directly affects their academic performance and their social-emotional well being.

I have been cautious about not overwhelming my new mentee with too much support. She also has a new para, the Instructional Coach, and admin supporting her so I make sure she knows that I am there. She has only been there two weeks now so there is still a lot to learn.

In my role as the DTL, I am the go to gal for every staff member's technology equipment. Thankfully, my new mentee came from Jeffco as a para and knows a lot of the Jeffco processes. Although she has to go through all of the new teacher onboarding as if she was a new employee. I have tried to help ease her cognitive load by using her various tech in ways to work smarter, not harder.

That is the biggest take away so far from these classes, the teacher leader summit and these readings is that we need to be one of the change agents in our school to change the way "we" think as a school. Positive thinking = Positive results

As other stated, this sounds amazing in theory, but in practice, there are really amazing teachers out there who are just NOT team players. They want to be on their own island, doing what has worked for them for many years and do not want to collaborate with others and seem like they do not want anyone to support them or rock their boats. Even if admin encourages collaboration and group/school success, if certain teachers have students who perform well and do not have behavior issues that need admin support, they are usually left alone to do their own thing, on their island.

This I truly believe and...we need students AT SCHOOL to learn and if attendance is a consistent issue, these student measures of success are not truly showing the effectiveness of the instruction. We are always working on this in our building but I do not know if the "bigger picture" looks at this when factoring student equity and achievement statistics.

no wonder we're all running on Red Bull and love ;) This is just another reminder of why taking good care of ourselves mentally and physcally is so important if we want to be effective and regulated educators!

I realize that we should be analyzing student work and assessments to chart our course of instruction as well as follow the rigor of the lesson schedule. I think that fitting all of this in every day is the biggest challenge with these newer time intensive math and literacy curriculums. I feel like it takes many years to get comfortable enough with all of the components and timing of these curriculums and then they change so frequently.

These are all such powerful questions to ask during and after our lessons. I am trying to think about how I would incorporate these more into our library lessons since they are often only 30 min. including a read aloud and checkout.

I always remember this analogy when trying to remember which is which type of assessment. "Tasting the soup" throughout our lessons gives us the data to know how to move forward thoughtfully with our delivery and what we need to rework.

YES! I think if we talk about feedback opportunistically, it will be received more more positively by students.

I agree that whole class feedback is not as powerful as individual feedback. I love that many digital tools make giving individual feedback easier like Book Creator and Adobe Express. Students can read teacher feeback and revise their work and reply to any feedback comments. As a DTL, this is helpful when working with all classes in the school.

I feel like this is a forever goal of public education to communicate and build this clarity and shared language between students, families and educators. I feel like in our very transient, multi-lingual, Title-1 school environment where students enroll and unenroll every week, it is hard to maintain communication and build classroom & school community but we are always trying our best.

This is precisely why it is imperative that we have highly trained teachers in our classrooms so they have the expertise to make this instructional decisions and know how to change, combine and add to the lessons according to their students' needs and teaching goals. I think it is extremely difficult to be a natural at this just walking in from a different profession and trying to learn on the job.

My mentee is a STEM teacher this year and this phase of collaboration with peers is exceptionally vital and corresponds well with the engineering design process of researching, brainstorming, trial and error and improving results.

This is SUPER important to me and I naturally love incorporating humor and fun into my lessons. Students are so much more engaged and want to be around you when you can also laugh at yourself.

This is one of THE most important areas to focus on throughout the year but especially at the beginning when you are getting to know your class and they are getting to know you and your expectations. When you are consistent, caring but firm and follow through on the things you say, your students will know that you are true to your word and will follow expections better.

I have experienced this for many years and know it to be very true. One of the things I miss most about being a classroom teacher is being able to really get to your your students and their families to build relationships and trust. As a Librarian with 450 students, it is harder to get to know students on that level. As I get to know students throughout the years and remember certain things about them, their behavior definitely improves for me as our relationships grow stronger.