Developing Effective Mentor Teachers: Tools and Practices
What makes mentoring effective for preservice teachers just learning to teach? Can mentoring for ambitious teaching be learned? In this video, we share how we're developing a system of tools, practices, and resources that mentors and preservice teachers can use together over the course of student teaching. This system includes videos and protocols for six key mentoring practices — making thinking explicit, modeling the work of teaching, pre-briefing and debriefing, co-planning, co-teaching, and analyzing student work together. We invite our colleagues in the field to think with us about what's working so far and what tensions arise from efforts to influence how mentor teachers and preservice teachers collaborate.