Great question, Brian!

Part of our work includes sending regular newsletters with timely tips and resources. Through these send-outs we have learned what mentors are finding useful and are able to direct them to the site with "just-in-time" supports. If you'd like to look at these newsletters, there is an archive that can be accessed in the upper-right hand corner of the website.

We also are pointing pre-service teachers to the resources by coordinating efforts with the methods classes they are enrolled in. For example, the professional roommate conversation resource was required by the methods course as part of their initial experience in the clinical placement. We also are working with university supervisors to help mentors gain access to the tools that may be most helpful for them.

Caroline Hadley, Karin Lohwasser, Soo-Yean Shim, & Mark Windschitl

Thanks, Jason! I believe Karin has replied below, but we also want to add that next year, 3 of our 4 university sites will be having mentor training and so we are excited to see how these resources can help shape and support that process!

Karin Lohwasser, Mark Windschitl, Soo-Yean Shim, & Caroline Hadley

Hi, Molly! Great question! We are conducting interviews with preservice teachers (4 times/year) and mentors (twice/year) about what resources they find as useful and how the resources are enhancing preservice teachers' opportunities to learn about planning, teaching, and assessment. We are also asking preservice teachers to fill out survey logs (once/three weeks). In our previous study (without intervention) we conducted similar interviews and as we collect more information we hope to see how the resources of the new study have impacted the frequency and quality of preservice teachers' opportunities to learn.

Regarding your point about helping the school districts see the value of these resources, we haven't planned on collecting data on that, but that is a great suggestion. We'll think about ways to communicate with the school districts about these resources and how to study their views on those. Thanks for helpful feedback!

Soo-Yean Shim, Caroline Hadley, Karin Lohwasser, & Mark Windschitl

Thanks Soo-Yean! I'm sure you will end up with really valuable information from the interviews. I think it would be fascinating if you were able to measure impact beyond the teachers/mentors, but if that's too big you could consider adding a question or two to your interview protocol for mentors about whether they think that there is a place for the resources beyond student teaching. 

Thanks for sharing, Irina! We agree that mentor teachers are often extremely busy and we have had mentors and teacher candidates provide evidence for this in interviews! Our hope is that these resources alleviate some of the uncertainty that comes with mentoring a novice teacher and makes their work easier. For example, one of the tools, the professional roommate conversation, helps the pair set expectations for how the novice and mentor will interact, give and receive feedback, and communicate in general. This should save them both time and frustrations in the long term.

We also work to keep the newsletter very brief so that the mentor only receives information that is relevant at that time. Through this year’s work with mentors we are discovering which parts of the newsletter they actually benefit from and we are planning to re-shape some of the ways information is provided next year so that it is most helpful to them.

Karin Lohwasser, Mark Windschitl, Soo-Yean Shim, & Caroline Hadley

Thank you! This is very important work! I forwarded link to your video to our Director of Fieldwork, you might help us to improve our mentoring practice.

Hi Daniel!  We appreciate the idea of working with administrators, which is not an area we've tackled yet (as we're hoping to understand the impact of the tools for mentors and student teachers first).  Are there suggestions you would have about working with administrators from your work?

And great question about whether these materials are "STEM specific"!  This has been an area of much discussion on our team — we have tried to design the materials to be broadly applicable to any student teaching/mentor relationship to enhance impact, but it's an ongoing productive tension in the work.

Courtney, great question. Our program selects mentors, the group each year is about half new mentors and half experienced. We try to group our novices in schools, for example two or three in the same school so that they can do some informal mentoring of one another, more like peer support I should say. From our research, we could see that occasionally the best teachers do not make the best mentors, and sometimes teachers who have modest success in classrooms can be great mentors, they are just good at knowing how to provide emotional support, offer targeted feedback, and to allow novices to experiment a bit with their pedagogy. We did find in the previous research, that mentors who taught in responsive and equitable ways provided far more oppotunities to novices to learn about planning, teaching, and assessment. If a prep program can develop a stable relationship with a group of capable mentors, then it enhances the possibilites for the success of all novices.

Julie, I knew that question would come up :) Yes, It was Vyond. We debated about whether we should have real cases of action (feedback, looking at student work) or perhaps actors playing a role or the last option was animation. We chose animation because of its flexibility--you can have the characters say and do things that would be hard to capture from real people on video. We are currently debating about whether to have real video about giving and receiving feedback because this is so central to the work of mentoring. 

Will definitely keep you all up to date!  Thanks again.

Jennifer this is what we are hearing in our current research from mentors, the desire to give adequate feedback. We are not sure they know the range of things about which they could give feedback either. We use the Lipton and Wellman materials to guide a lot of our thinking about feedback and about mentor-novice communication in general. These we feel are great resources. We are going to develop tools that will allow options for how a mentor could give feedback on particular dimensions of teaching, for example, on how the novice interacts with students working in small groups and then pushes their thinking. 

Hi Jennifer and Mark,

Very much agreed that providing effective feedback is a challenging task!  To build on Mark's response re: tools, we have a few prototypes in the Pre-Briefing and Debriefing area of the website that we'd love to continue to refine.  In particular, the "Goals/Feedback Index Cards" and "Check-In Protocols + Feedback Tips" are tools that some candidates have tried and that are informed by our research with candidates and mentors.  We'd love to hear if you try any of these out or improve them in any ways!

Hi, Doug! Thanks for a great question!

We found that the quality of learning opportunities that preservice teachers get in their field placements (facilitated by their mentors) vary a lot. We thought that one of the major challenges is the lack of support for mentor teachers to help them develop effective mentoring practices. We developed resources and tools to facilitate productive collaboration between mentors and preservice teachers. For example, we developed feedback tools to help mentors give helpful feedback to their mentees (preservice teachers).

The supports are designed to enhance the content of their collaboration, and those might provide some implications for "structures" in the collaboration, too, as you said. For example, mentors and preservice teachers can discuss what structures work best for their feedback or debriefing processes using our protocols and tools. Is this answering your question? Or are you thinking of other kinds of "structures" in the mentoring process? Please let us know! Thank you.

Hi Cynthia,

You raise such an important question here about what the impact of differential learning opportunities are longer-term!  We have not yet been able to follow any of the preservice teachers into their own classrooms longitudinally as part of this study, but team, I'm wondering if we have any anecdotal sense of this?

Thanks!