December 3, 2024 — Highly effective mentor teachers are a crucial component of successful teacher residency programs. Working daily with teacher residents, they serve as one-to-one professional educators, models, and thought partners, which gives them significant influence over how residents develop. So, how can mentor teachers be best developed and supported to maximize their impact as teacher educators? This question has been a key focus of NCTR’s 2022 SEED grant project focused on mentor teachers within the specific context of teacher residencies.
Over the past two years, NCTR, in collaboration with the Teacher Development Network LLC (TDN) and leaders across various teacher residencies, has identified priority beliefs, mindsets, and skills essential for mentor teacher development, along with scalable, cost-effective professional learning structures. Below, we share some updates and highlights from our Mentor Professional Learning (PL) pilot.
The Mentor PL pilot program began in June 2024 and will finish in March 2025. During this period, NCTR, TDN, and the pilot program site host, Dallas College, have offered 142 mentor teachers four days of in-person, facilitated professional learning and four just-in-time asynchronous online modules, each requiring approximately four hours. With support from a 2023 TQP grant, Dallas College’s mentor teachers earned a stipend for participating in the pilot.
The Hidden Curriculum of Mentoring
In addition to the skills offered in most Mentor PL spaces, such as co-teaching, observation/feedback cycles, and gradual release strategies, we’ve found that an additional set of skills—less frequently seen in mentor curricula—also yields powerful impacts, namely relationship building, navigating identity differences across mentor-resident relationships, and skills to build one’s capacity for practicing compassion (for self and others). NCTR and TDN have centered this “hidden curriculum” in the new mentor professional learning program we are building. To learn more about the mindsets and actions identified as important for effective mentor teachers in teacher residencies outlined in this project, check out Portrait of a Residency Mentor.
Supporting mentors in shifting their mindsets and developing these human-centered skills requires reimagining our approach to professional learning. Our white paper, Reimagining Mentor Professional Learning for Teacher Residencies, explains several promising approaches we are utilizing in more detail.
Navigational Capital
Our focus on the hidden curriculum has led to cultivating curricular components that build navigational capital, which Tara Yosso (2015) defines as “the ability to navigate complex institutions.” While navigational capital is crucial for all classroom educators, it is particularly important for mentors because they must also be able to support teacher residents who are seeking to understand their role within several complex settings, including their school, university, and teacher residency programs. For example, consider all the roles, rules, and expectations (many unspoken) at play within a school. When teacher residents enter the building for the first time, they’re rarely aware of the system surrounding the classroom where they’ll complete their clinical experience. Yet that system will impact their work every day. Additionally, teacher residents and mentor teachers must also be savvy at balancing the sometimes competing demands of the teacher education program and the daily work of classrooms. While our most perceptive mentor teachers may teach this informally, it’s rarely a formal part of mentor professional learning—a gap we are working to address.
Mentor teachers in the pilot have responded positively to the components of the professional learning system that directly address and provide opportunities to process and practice with navigational capital and the other hidden curriculum elements. They report feeling part of a positive learning community, more ready to mentor, more knowledgeable about creating brave spaces for teacher residents to learn and grow, and more steady in their approach to guiding teacher resident learning. Below are a few quotes mentors provided when asked about important takeaways from the professional learning:
“I will make a bigger effort to actively listen while communicating with my resident so that we can continue to grow together.”
“I really loved the information on how to have crucial conversations. As teachers, we have them with parents, students, and coworkers. Hard things happen all the time, and it’s great to learn how to deal with them in a professional way.”
“It was very informative on how a mentee can feel during teaching, and it taught me how to cope with her when she feels a certain way.”
Watch this video to hear a few of the mentors speak about their experiences in the professional learning pilot.
What’s Next?
There are two upcoming opportunities to learn more about the mentor professional learning work NCTR and TDN are engaged in.
- We are excited to discuss navigational capital development for mentors in a session at the upcoming NCTR National Symposium and hope you will be there to join the conversation.
- Join our upcoming NCTR Mentor PL Community Learning Experience sessions on Thursday, January 23, 2025 (Noon-1:30 p.m. CT) and Wednesday, February 26, 2025 (12:00-1:30 p.m. CT). If you would like to be added to the calendar invite for these sessions, send an email to ehearn@nctresidencies.org.
Stay tuned for further opportunities to engage with us on topics related to mentor professional learning.