Beyond Buddies: Mentoring New Teachers to Instructional Excellence

This keynote address will offer some of the New Teacher Center’s latest thinking on improving teacher practice through instructional mentoring focused not on survival, but on improved student learning.

Successful teachers are highly literate, well versed in content knowledge, and have the pedagogical tools to support pupil learning. They care deeply about their pupils and understand that their task is to help them achieve, regardless of background, socio-economic levels, or learning needs. They are also able to link their practice both to pupil content standards and professional teaching standards.

Ellen will describe the four key elements of the instructional mentoring model as follows:

• Articulation of Best Practice: Mentors learn to articulate to new teachers their own professional knowledge and pedagogical decision-making in ways that new teachers can understand.

• Balancing Immediate and Long-term Needs: Instructional mentors balance new teachers’ day-to-day needs with focused plans for their professional growth.

• Approach to Teaching as Inquiry: Instructional mentors understand that their job is to help new teachers analyse and reflect on their practice. Their goal is to develop teachers committed to a lifetime of professional learning.

• Commitment to Collaborative Partnerships: Through their work with new teachers, instructional mentors model how to build collaborative, trusting professional relationships. They also help new teachers to build similar relationships with their colleagues to help to build strong school communities focused on inquiry.

Ellen Moir, University of California

Ellen Moir is Executive Director of the New Teacher Center (NTC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a national resource for high quality new teacher and new administrator induction programmes. The NTC conducts research, develops and administers induction programmes, and consults with organisations, educational leaders, and policy makers throughout the US on issues related to new educator support.

Ellen has also served for 15 years as Director of the Santa Cruz New Teacher Project, a beginning teacher induction programme that has supported more than 12,000 beginning teachers during the first two years of their careers. From 1985 to 2000, she was UCSC Director of Teacher Education.