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Anne
Watkins, New Teacher Center, Santa Cruz
Anne
Watkins began by giving us an overview of how the New Teacher Center
works, especially its emphasis on close mentoring of student teachers
as they learn how to teach.
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Professional
Development for Those Who
Work with Beginning Teachers
Teachers who receive effective support in their first
few years of teaching are most likely to remain in the profession
and become the committed, caring, quality educators of tomorrow.
Foundations in Mentoring is a two-day training that focuses
on the knowledge, skills, and understanding that are critical
for those who work with beginning teachers.
Developed by the nationally renowned New Teacher Center,
this training is guided by the belief that learning to teach is
a career-long developmental process that involves a continuous
cycle of planning, teaching, and reflecting. Some of the key concepts
included are:
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Creating
a Vision of Quality Teaching
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Defining
Mentoring Roles
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Identifying
New Teachers' Needs
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Building
an Effective Mentoring Relationship
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Selecting
Support Strategies
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Establishing
an Environment for Professional Growth
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Highlighting
the Role of Professional Standards in Mentoring
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The
New Teacher Center puts substantial emphasis on the Teacher Advisors
for the new teachers. These are teachers on-site. The new teachers and Teacher Advisors are brought
together by the coordinators from the New Teacher Center, developing
a community of cross-site new teachers and Teacher Advisors-Mentors.
The Teacher Advisor is released to the project and takes on 15 to 18
new teachers to mentor, providing Regular Observation discussion before
and after the lesson.
The
coordinator organizes weekly professional development meeting for the
mentor/advisors. The NTC does Videotaping of beginning teachers
and Beginning teacher seminars look at these videotapes, using them
for reflection and an opportunity for self-assessment. Anne noted that there are not a lot of experienced
teachers at the low-performing middle schools, and few of the faculties
have been teaching more than five years. She noted that this made finding Teacher-Advisors even more difficult.
The NTC’s Oakland project, now in its second year, is working in six
low-performing Oakland Middle Schools.
Anne emphasized two features of the NTC program, an emphasis on Teacher
Competence and Teacher Caring. As an example of Teacher Competence,
she pointed to the Center’s use of the backward design idea of Grant
Wiggins in the development of LESSONS, starting with student work, reflecting
on the Disciplinary Knowledge to be taught, and constructing the Pedagogical
Knowledge needed for teaching. As an example of Teacher Caring, she
pointed to the importance of student teachers of knowing the students
as individuals and of developing a keen sense of the diversity in their
classrooms, ultimately designing ways to use that diversity as a source
of ideas for bridging to subject matter understanding.
(Books available at the conference on this point: Carol Lee’s
work, Sarah Freedman’s M-Class and Cultural Exchange books, and Lisa
Delphit’s Other People’s Children).
Back
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Science
Building A, Room 375
1
Harpst Street
Humboldt State University
Arcata,
California 95521
Tel/Fax:
707.826.3374
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