Working with Your Mentor Teacher

Your success during your first years of teaching depends, to a great extent, upon how you take advantage of the available support. Remember that no one can read your mind, and there are no stupid questions! If you have a question, ask! Find people who can teach you what you need to learn! Those will become your "informal mentors."

You will also have some "formal mentors"--people assigned to help you out. Thinking about how to build a productive mentor relationship with those people is definitely worth the time. Think about what you expect from a mentoring relationship. How do the four functions listed below fit your expectations?

The Four Mentoring Functions

• Relating:     "build and maintain relationships with their mentees based on mutual trust, respect, and professionalism." 
• Assessing: "gather and diagnose data about their mentees’ ways of teaching and learning; they determine their mentees’ competency and confidence to handle a given situation." 
• Coaching:    help the new teacher "fine-tune their professional skills, enhance their grasp of subject matter, locate and acquire resources and expand their repertoire of teaching modalities." 
• Guiding: " wean their mentees away from dependence by guiding them through the process of reflecting on decisions and actions for themselves and encouraging them to construct their own informed teaching and learning approaches. Source:

Portner, H. (1998). Mentoring new teachers. Thousand oaks, CA: Corwin Press. p. 7- 8.

Think about what you bring to this Mentoring Team relationship and what kinds of help you anticipate needing. Number these four functions, putting a "1" by the function that you see as what you most hope this mentoring relationship will provide for you.

Remember that the functions a mentor can best serve may change as you develop your knowledge and expertise through the year.