A career in teaching is an attractive option for many young adults. One of the major challenges in a career in teaching is the student teaching experience that is normally placed at the end of the degree program. This post will provide some suggestion for teacher mentors

Go Over Local Expectations

Every school has its own set of policies and expectations that all employees need to adhere too. Often, the student teacher is not aware of these and it is the mentoring teacher’s responsibility to provide some idea of what is expected. This includes such things as showing them around the campus, communicating expectations for how to dress, discipline procedures, and even how to deal with grades.

Knowing these little things can allow the new teacher to focus on teaching rather than the administrative aspects of the classroom.

Provide Feedback

Feedback is critical so that the new teacher knows what they are doing well and wrong. It is, of course, important to mention what the student teacher does well. However, growth happens by providing support to overcome weaknesses.

The temptation for many supervising teachers is simply to mention what the problems are and let the student figure out what to do. This approach may work for an experience or a highly independent teacher. However, for most new teachers they need specific support on what to do in order to improve their teaching and overcome a weakness.

Therefore, criticism without some sort of suggestion for how to overcome the problem is not beneficial. In addition, it is important to only address major problems that can cripple the educational experience of the students rather than every single weakness in the students teaching. We all have issues and problems with our teaching and for beginners, only the big problems should be corrected.

The student also should provide feedback on how they view their own teaching. Most teacher education programs require this in the form of a journal. However, the benefit of the journal is only in discussing it with others such as the mentor teacher.

Lead By Example

IN reality, in order for a student to be a successful teacher, they need to see what successful teaching is so they can imitate until perfection. What this means for you as a supervising teacher is that you need to lay the example for the student to imitate. Everyone has there own style but a good example goes a long way in molding the teaching approach of a student.

This also means that a mentor teacher needs to do a lot of verbalizing in terms of what they do. Often, as an experienced teacher, things become automatic in the classroom. You know what to do without much thought or discussion. The problem is that if there is a lack of explanation in terms of wqhat is happening the student teacher is not able to deermine why you are doing certain things. Therefore, a mentor teacher must explained explictiylywhat they are doing and why while they are provding the exmple of teaching.

Conclusion

Students who dream of teaching need support in order to have success. This involves bringing in people with more experience to support these young teachers as they develop their skillset. This means that even experienced teachers need some support in order to determine how to help new teachers