Jewish Educators Turn To Mentoring For Growth, Support

Amy Ament, left, of the Jewish New Teacher Project, coaches Susan Mindrick, a second-year teacher at Carmel Academy in Greenwich

Adele Chabot’s first year of teaching seemed like a nightmare to her, says the 22-year-old educator at the Barkai Yeshivah, a school in Flatbush serving Sephardic Jews.

“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” she says, recalling that she faced not only discipline problems, but also the overwhelming nature of adjusting to a new job and a new environment.

“Even if there are no discipline problems, it’s hard for a new teacher because everything is new,” Chabot says. “Planning a lesson is new; meeting with parents is new; learning to speak to students in the right way is new.”

But Chabot entered the classroom last September, ready to begin her second year in the field, with the professional confidence and self-esteem she lacked during the previous term. Calling herself a “changed teacher” and a changed person, she now says she’s “one of the happiest people in the world” — an educator who “loves” her students and looks forward to work each morning.

Not only does she feel she’s engaging the students on a deeper level, but, she says, the disciplinary problems have also disappeared. Rather than scream or shout at her students, as Chabot did last year, she now feels better able to handle problems, and that, she believes, leads to an atmosphere of mutual respect.

What made the difference, she says, is the guidance she’s received from one of the school’s veteran teachers, Vicky Kairy, through the Jewish New Teacher Project.

Part of the New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., JNTP is one of several relatively new programs that offer mentoring or coaching to teachers in Jewish day schools and yeshivas. Other programs include Hidden Sparks, launched in 2006 and now working with 34 schools, and Yeshiva University’s New Teacher Induction Program, now in its pilot year and involved with five schools.

While each program is unique, taking a different approach from the others, all have the same goal, says Shira Loewenstein, who heads the YU program. “It’s about advancing teaching and learning” in Jewish schools and yeshivas.

The programs have taken shape at a time when teacher burnout has affected as much as a half of all new teachers, including those in Jewish schools.

“Forty to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession in their first five years,” says Ellen Moir, CEO of the New Teacher Center, who cites a 2004 study for that figure. In the eyes of Moir and other educators, it’s a rate of attrition that hurts everyone, from students, teachers and schools to the community itself, especially after so much money has been invested into recruiting teachers and developing them professionally.

The Jewish New Teacher Project came into existence in 2002 after the attrition problem set off alarm bells at the Avi Chai Foundation, a private charity devoted to promoting Jewish education, says Fayge Safran, JNTP’s interim director.

At the time, she explains, the foundation did a needs-assessment study of what principals believed would most advance education in their schools, “and teacher mentoring surfaced as a common thread.” The foundation then researched various organizations involved in that work, leading Avi Chai staff members to the New Teacher Center, which, by all accounts, was having a huge impact on teacher retention.

Asked by the foundation to work in Jewish schools, the New Teacher Center agreed, creating JNTP as one of its divisions. JNTP now works with 49 schools in New York, New Jersey and five other locations around the country.

The work involves supporting new teachers in their first two years through “in-house mentors” — other, more veteran members of the school’s faculty who’ve been trained to coach their colleagues — and “visiting mentors,” or educators from outside the school. JNTP provides extensive training for both types of mentors, each of whom meets with and observes the new teacher for two hours a week, aiding them in such areas as analyzing student work, communicating with parents and planning a lesson.

Each new teacher also attends four seminars led by JNTP during those two years, Safran says — forums that cover classroom management, how to engage students and other subjects related to teaching.

“The goal is that, in two years, the new teacher will be an independent problem-solver,” no longer dependent on his or her mentor, Safran says. Like her counterparts at Hidden Sparks and YU’s New Teacher Induction Program, she adds that her program’s mentors don’t tell new teachers what to do, but, instead, act as their allies, helping them arrive at their own conclusions.

“One of the best compliments I ever got from a new teacher was, ‘Fayge, I hear your voice in my head,” recalls Safran, who became head of the organization when its director of seven years, Mark S. Silk, left las month.

The language at Hidden Sparks is more student-oriented, reflecting the program’s history. Debbie Niderberg, the organization’s director, says it was launched, in part, with seed money from philanthropists Pamela and George Rohr, interested in helping struggling students in Jewish day schools. With those funds, she and her colleagues developed a model that helps classroom teachers come up with individual strategies for each student, thus avoiding a tendency on the part of some educators to label students or place them in a box.

“The idea was to prevent students from falling through the cracks,” Niderberg says. “That was how we came up with the name of Hidden Sparks,” referring to the sparks, or strengths, within each child.

The mentors trained or employed by Hidden Sparks are referred to as coaches, and the teachers they help span the spectrum, from new teachers to veteran members of the faculty, from those without any degree to those with a master’s degree. As with JNTP, the program utilizes internal and external coaches, each of whom visits the classrooms of individual teachers and leads monthly forums for groups of educators.

At YU, what makes Shira Loewenstein’s program unique “is that we view new-teacher mentoring as part of the induction process,” but not the only part, she says. The process also includes creating a community of new teachers, creating a community of veteran teachers and working with the school’s leaders.

The program is part of YU’s Institute for University-School Partnership, which offers an array of services to each school, including help with financial planning, board governance and professional development, says Dina Rabhan, the institute’s director of recruitment, placement and induction. The belief, she adds, is that everything about a school — the finances, the community, the teaching — is interconnected.

One discovery made by educators at JNTP, Hidden Sparks and the YU program — all of which are based in New York — is that mentoring helps not only the teachers being coached, but the mentors themselves.

Vicky Kairy, Chabot’s mentor at the Barkai Yeshivah and a seven-year member of the school’s faculty, says her experience with JNTP has given her the chance “to sit down and reflect on what I’m doing as a teacher and what others are doing.”

Meanwhile, Kairy, 27, is proud of the progress made by Chabot, who, she believes, has “set herself up for success this year” by recognizing her strengths, as well as her weaknesses. And Chabot is now advising other new teachers “who had the same problems I had last year.” 

source

Review of Learning About Teaching

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher’s estimated “value-added”—computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students—as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Using data from six school districts, the initial report examines correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study finds that the measures are related, but only modestly. The report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. This conclusion is unsupported, as the data in fact indicate that a teachers’ value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.

http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching

Retaining Teacher Talent

Report 1. The View From Generation Y

Forward-looking leaders in states and districts will find in this report cutting-edge ideas on how to build a world-class teacher corps by understanding what attracts and dissuades Gen Y teachers from the profession.

Two overarching themes emerge:

• Teachers’ views on the best ways to structure teacher compensation are evolving.
• Teachers’ views on the conditions under which they work are influenced by their generation and experiences.

However, in both cases, there is strong evidence of a confluence and constancy of teacher views that spans the generations. The six key findings described in this report all point to the fact that supporting teacher effectiveness will likely have a profound impact on teacher retention.

Multi-media resources including a video chronicle and facilitator’s guide and presentations at national teacher quality conferences are presented with the report to aid those leading reforms at the district, state, and national levels.

Contents

Finding 3: Many teachers view removing ineffective colleagues from the classroom as a way to boost teacher effectiveness and think that unions sometimes protect ineffective teachers, yet they feel it important to preserve tenure protections.

Finding 4: Gen Y teachers tend to desire sustained, constructive, and individualized feedback from principals to help them become more effective in the classroom.

Finding 5: All teachers desire meaningful collaboration with their colleagues—not just younger ones.

Finding 6: Most Gen Y teachers believe they will stay in education, if not the classroom, for the long haul.

Building Adult Communities in Schools: Stronger Adult Communities Build Better Schools

Buses are unloading students; two buses will be late due to weather. Three teachers have called in sick, two are at workshops, and the guest teachers are checking in at the office. Two children are waiting to talk to an adult about a pushing fight they had as they entered the school, and a parent arrives to talk to the principal about an upcoming site council meeting. Teachers are meeting their students at their classroom doors, and hundreds of children are heading towards those rooms. The scene looks like the residents of a little village coming together to begin their day.

"It takes a village"
The issues that arise within this community are no less complicated than those of a real village. I have never heard of an effort by a village to comprehensively re-make itself over a period of a few years, yet this school community is in the process of attempting to do just that. Perhaps it has received a large grant to do so. Perhaps it is on a list of schools that have not shown yearly progress, so it is receiving extra funding to fix itself. Whatever the reason, many American schools are currently engaged in the process of a complete overhaul.

Origins’ work often involves helping schools renew themselves. We like to call it "renewal" rather than "reform," because renewal sounds more hopeful and more organic. We believe that the elements for success are already in the school: most school communities have an abundance of talented teachers and administrators, children capable of great strides forward, and families who care. The question is how we can increase the best of what is there, so that it becomes the culture of the school.

What’s required
It is not easy work, even under the best conditions, and "best conditions" are rare these days. What does it take? We’ve learned a great deal about that from workshop participants and on-site in the schools. Here are some of the conditions we hold as most important to successful school renewal.

* A willingness to work together within the adult community of the school towards a shared vision
* The energy and will to work hard—to change and grow
* A commitment to renewal for the whole school that is greater than each individual’s desire to go his/her own way
* The courage to shift from a culture of complaint to a culture of hope and possibility and to show that shift in the way the adults interact with each other--less talk about
* "These kids" and more conversations that begin "I think the children will be more successful if we ….."
* Endless patience—with children, with their families, and with each other.

All of these elements have to do with the grown-ups in the school because we have found that no matter how good the curriculum, how excellent the methods of instruction, how much we focus on teaching social skills to the children, it is the adults and the ways they think, feel, act, and interact with each other that determines how all the other efforts will fare.

Teaching all the time
When the adults are together, the children learn. We are the water in which they swim and the air they breathe. When we show care for each other, they begin to do the same. When we are sarcastic, so are they. We shout. They shout. We laugh. They laugh. They are watching us all the time, and they imitate what they see. The only other job I know that has such high stakes regarding language--verbal and body--is parenting, and for exactly the same reasons.

Probably the single most important factor in a classroom or school that is fully using The Responsive Classroom approach is the way the adults talk to the children. This is what we usually call teacher language, the language we use as we interact with children. But equally important is the way that we talk to each other.

The language used to disagree with a colleague or discuss a child makes all the difference in how the disagreement is taken or whether something productive comes out of the discussion. Here are a few moves you can help the adults in your school create better adult relationships.

VISION
Make a picture for yourselves of the way you want your school to look, feel, sound. What is your vision for a caring work environment?

GUIDELINES
Establish guidelines for adult behavior, including language, and make them stick. A staff covenant is only as good as the strength of its presence in the community:

* Post it in important places.
* Read it at the beginning of every meeting (staff, teams, home groups)
* Establish ways to remind each other when you slip (a discreet note, a non-verbal signal, a one-to-one conversation. One school uses the term "pinches" to refer to moments when you tell someone that you feel they have stepped out of bounds of the agreement.
* Give up gossip. Speak to the relevant party, not your friend, about language or actions that hurt or seem to break down group spirit.
* Review the agreement at least once during the year, for example in January, and make changes that seem necessary.
* What you need is a living document that is clear and present in your daily life together.

EFFECTIVE MEETING FORMAT
Make every meeting count. Set agendas ahead of time, with clear time indications for each topic. Assign roles: facilitator, time-keeper, recorder, community-builder. Decide how you will decide: consensus or majority rule. Close the meeting—don’t just drift away. Acknowledge each other. Play—even if for just a moment!

ROLE PLAYS
Use The Responsive Classroom structure to figure out how to solve dilemmas. Model the situation till you get to the tricky part, and then together figure out the languge and actions that will honor the rules as well as meet needs.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Using "I" statements, each person or opposing group states their concerns and describes the situation as they see it, while the other person or group listens carefully. Then each recapitulates the other’s position. Brainstorm win-win solutions, and pick the best one to try. Check back with each other to see how the solution is working.

PROBLEM-SOLVING MEETINGS
Circle up and state the problem. Agree on the rules of the meeting (no names; "I" statements; willingness to work to solve the problem). Each person has a chance to speak briefly about the problem and the effect it is having on the community. Discuss the possible causes of the problem. Brainstorm solutions. Choose a solution by consensus. Decide how you will know if the solution is working and set up a time to meet again to assess progress with the problem.

These are the structures that provide a scaffolding for a community. No group of people, certainly not a group under the levels of stress experienced in many schools, can function at a high level without a structure for dealing with difficulties. Start with the areas of support you need most, and build from there the school village that can raise the children to success.

http://www.originsonline.org/product_info.php?products_id=17&s=meta&ss=advanced_search_result

Beyond Buddies Mentoring New Teachers to Instructional Excellence

Welcome to the 2005–06 school year.  Like you, all of us at the New Teacher Center look
forward to new accomplishments and challenges as we work to improve teaching and learning in our nation’s classrooms. We hope this issue of Reflections offers you insights into how to help new teachers and their students to achieve their potential.
Too often induction programs focus more on teacher retention than developing high quality teachers. As we have refined our teacher induction model since 1988, a key insight has emerged— comprehensive mentor-based programs can improve teacher retention and teacher practice simultaneously. This issue offers some of our latest thinking
on improving teacher practice through instructional mentoring focused not on survival, but on improved student learning.
Mentoring for instructional excellence is very different from the traditional buddy system that many of us experienced when we first began teaching.
The buddy system pairs a senior teacher with little or no mentor training or release time with a beginning teacher. Since buddy mentors are treated just as new teachers often are—left to sink or swim, relying on intuition and good intentions to stay afloat— they understandably focus on offering emotional support and helping beginning teachers with logistics. Though buddy mentors may introduce new teachers to the norms and expectations of the school district, they aren’t given the training and resources to link mentoring to the norms and expectations inherent in excellent teaching.
The New Teacher Center’s induction model moves beyond the buddy system to link effective mentoring directly to a vision of effective teaching. We believe that successful teachers are highly literate, well versed in content knowledge, and have the pedagogical tools to support student learning. They care deeply about their students and understand that their task is to help all students, regardless of background, socio-economic levels, or learning needs, achieve. Successful teachers are able to link their practice both to student content standards and professional teaching standards. We select exemplary senior teachers who embody this vision of effective teaching to serve as mentors, then train and support them to translate their understanding of instruction into the day-to-day practice of new teachers.

Our instructional mentoring model has four key elements:
Articulation of Best Practice
Mentors learn to articulate to new teachers their own professional knowledge and pedagogical decision-making in ways that new teachers can understand. They help novices co-construct a deep, conceptual understanding of teaching and to have confidence in their pedagogical choices.
Balancing Immediate and Long-Term Needs Instructional mentors balance new teachers’ day-to-day needs with focused plans for their professional growth.
Approach to Teaching as Inquiry Instructional mentors understand their job is to help new teachers analyze and reflect on their practice. Rather than passing on their own expertise, they model how to analyze student work across content areas and to differentiate instruction. Their goal is to develop teachers
committed to a lifetime of professional learning.
Commitment to Collaborative Partnerships Through their work with new teachers, instructional mentors model how to build collaborative, trusting profes- sional relationships. They also help new teachers to build similar relationships with their colleagues to help build strong school communities focused on inquiry.
In this issue of Reflections, you have the opportunity to view specific examples of instructional mentoring across grade levels and content areas. The authors offer a look inside their unique instructional mentoring practices and
share perspectives on supporting the development of meaningful and effective pedagogy in beginning teacher practice.

www.newteachercenter.org/newsletters/ReflectionsF05.pdf