Success Stories

Mentoring New Teachers for Success:
A Project GREAT Success Story from the Far West Region

On a sunny Saturday morning in October, cups of coffee in hand, a group of 13 adult education teachers find their seats for the first session of the Far West GREAT’s New Teacher Academy in El Paso, Texas. There’s the usual grumbling typical to early morning Saturday workshops: missing a daughter’s soccer game or a lost opportunity to catch up on much needed sleep. Yet, for the next 9 months, these teachers met 3 more Saturdays, developed an action research project, and presented their findings to their peers. (Note: Academy materials and teacher presentations can be found online at http://farwestgreat.org/page5.html#NTAIV) After all this hard work, all new teachers felt that their classroom practice had improved as a result of the Academy. In the words of one teacher: “I think students benefited by having a better, more relaxed, more active learning environment. Classes improved, and students jumped to the next level. I have fun in my classroom, and I am more open to a relaxed less-structured classroom.”

One of the key ingredients to the success of this year’s New Teacher Academy was the active role played by mentors. Each participant was assigned an experienced peer mentor to help them develop a strategy to implement changes to their instructional practice based on the strategies they had learned during the academy. In their projects, the teachers had to identify at least three active-learning strategies from Tate (2004), implement them in their classroom, and document the effects on the learners. During the workshops, facilitator Barbara Baird, modeled many of these strategies such as games, graphic organizers, mnemonic devices, reciprocal teaching, visualization, role-plays and many others. Mentors joined the new teachers during the last hour of each workshop and made their own arrangements for meeting outside of class. The participants reported spending an average of 6 hours in mentoring activities during the academy, of which 56% was spent in face-to-face meetings, 27% on email communication, and 17% on the phone.

A formal evaluation of the mentoring experience revealed that new teachers were very positive about having a mentor. All of the new teachers felt that the overall mentoring experience was positive and that mentoring had helped them develop a better understanding of adult education. More importantly, all but one of the teachers reported that mentoring had had a positive impact in the way they taught in the classroom. One teacher summed it up: “Mentoring was good because with a more experienced teacher you get more confident with your abilities. No one knows how to teach adults better than someone who has done it.”

It could well be argued that this model of teacher support is closer to coaching than mentoring because it was focused primarily on helping teachers successfully complete their action research projects. We assumed, however, that while working together mentors and new teachers would develop the trust that would allow the development of a richer relationship. The evaluations of the mentoring program confirmed our hunches. Mentors and teachers only spent an average of 15% of their time together discussing the academy project. The rest of the time was spent talking about classroom strategies (33%), specific problems encountered in the classroom (18%), the work environment (15%), getting to know each other personally (11%) and classroom observations (8%). As one teacher put it: “It feels great to know there are others who go through the same thing we do. Mentoring allows friendships to grow and help one another when work can get overwhelming.”

The fact that the interaction between mentors and new teachers was overwhelmingly positive is explained in great measure to the quality of teachers we found as mentors. We recruited heavily from previous master teacher academies and among teachers who had some experience as presenters in conferences or other workshops. Mentors also received some training on effective mentoring and read Peterson (1989) as well as other resources. The training focused on how to become an empathetic listener, facilitating the new teachers’ personal and professional development, and, more than anything, avoiding the “advice trap.” “Our experience was mentee-driven: We worked on each problem or situation that they brought into our meetings and discussions. I spent time reassuring them of their potential & abilities,” one of the mentors commented. The mentors also had a chance to discuss their concerns with each other after each workshop session. It was important for mentors to see how their peers were handling difficult mentoring situations and to get some feedback on their performance as well.

The rationale for extensive new teacher training and a mentoring component is clear: first, most new adult education teachers were not trained in the field of education or if they were, most of their experience came from the K-12 system; second, historically high levels of teacher turnover in adult education are due in part to the sense of isolation that many new teachers experience in their programs; and third, change in the classroom is more likely to result from relevant and intensive workshops that provide teachers opportunities to try out new strategies and share them with their peers (Smith, Hofer, 2004). The New Teacher Academy seeks to address these issues by providing a dynamic overview of adult learning theory and a chance to implement new research-based strategies in the classroom and offer new teachers the moral and professional support that they need to succeed.

Peterson, R. (1995). Handbook for Mentors. Retrieved April 11, 2007, from UC Irvine Department of Education site: http://www.gse.uci.edu/doehome/EdResource/ Publications/MentorTeacher/Contents.html

Smith, C., & Hofer, J (2004). Pathways to change: A summary of findings of NCSALL’s staff development study. Focus on Basics, Volume 5, Issue D, Retrieved April 11, 2007, from http://www.ncsall.net/?id=233.

Tate, M.L. (2004). Sit & get won’t grow dendrites: Professional learning strategies that engage the adult brain. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.