Excellence With Equity: A Mentor’s Approach

Editor’s note: This blog is part one in a three-part series that examines how mentoring can support beginning teachers in cultivating excellence with equity. Find the second part here.

My school district recently articulated “excellence with equity” as a core value. It means that all children and adults in the district are held to high expectations and that, in the pursuit of these expectations, everyone should be equipped with the supports they need to get there. By providing targeted supports, while keeping students at the center of our work, we seek to prepare all of our students for success in college, career and community.

Yet, as a district, we know that having high expectations and providing high-quality, individualized support is only part of our work as equity-focused educators. In all levels of our system, we must also identify and eradicate opportunity gaps for students that result in educational achievement disparities. In the classroom, this requires an intentional focus on…

• planning for equitable access to core instruction;

• employing instructional practices that close the opportunity gap;

• analyzing outcomes with a critical eye for disproportionality;

• reflecting on and adjusting instructional practices with the goal of increased student engagement and student success.

As a new-educator mentor, my gap-closing work specifically involves helping early-career educators to develop their strengths as critically reflective and responsive practitioners who utilize a variety of culturally and linguistically responsive practices. These strengths help ensure equitable access for all learners.

As with teaching, mentoring is an ongoing, reflective process; I learn and adopt new tools along the way. In this blog series, I identify three specific ways mentors can help beginning teachers cultivate classrooms rooted in excellence with equity: 

1. Help them consider their own identities and how teacher and student identities influence assets-based teaching and learning.
2. Build their strengths in culturally and linguistically responsive practices.
3. Expand their critical lenses toward advocacy for students and professional agency in rerouting the school-to-prison pipeline.

I’ll address the first one here. In our district, beginning teachers are increasingly more diverse in terms of their life experience and skills and the professional pathways they took to become educators. This means that, upon entering the classroom, each of them has a different learning curve to reach excellence with equity for their students. Some administrators might see this diversity as a challenge or seek to “identify and fill in the professional gaps” that beginning teachers might have, compared with veteran teachers. However, I view this diversity as an incredible asset to our school community and look for ways to leverage every beginning teacher’s strengths in building a responsive practice.

Begin the Conversation

The conversations begin at our district’s new-educator orientation day and continue in subsequent mentoring conversations. At the orientation, we help educators get to know our students in a generalized way by providing district demographic data about their race, language-learner status, home language, socio-economic status, special education needs, advanced learning needs and general academic achievement. In this presentation, we also highlight student successes as well as gaps that we are working to close. We often invite students to join us and share their talents or words of wisdom for the beginning educators. 

Building a Community

We then get to know each other a bit and build our new-educator community by engaging in conversations anchored to the Teaching Tolerance resource “My Multicultural Self.” Specifically, we draw comparisons or contrasts between our own identities and lived experiences and those of our students, all while paying attention to possible biases we may hold as a result of our experiences. These conversations are enhanced at a later time in individual mentoring meetings: Mentors provide practical activities and resources that support new teachers in getting to know their students through a variety of lenses and in building a positive classroom community.

Individualized Mentoring Conversations

Specifically in mentoring conversations, I have collaborated with beginning teachers to plan community-building activities using “My Multicultural Self.” I have also used different tools to support them in creating biographical sketches of each of their students, which might consist of students’ interests, strengths, multiple intelligences, language proficienc(ies), special learning needs and other related information. To specifically identify the linguistic strengths of English language learners in the classroom, I draw beginning teachers’ attention to the WIDA Can Do Descriptors and Name Charts.

Beginning with the cultural, linguistic, academic and social assets that students bring to the classroom sets a positive, student-centered foundation. It supports new educators in discussing the students in terms of what they can do and bring to the classroom, rather than what they can’t do or lack. This key shift, from deficit-based to asset-based, is fundamental to cultivating excellence with equity.

In part two of this series, I’ll discuss the second recommendation: Build new teachers’ strengths in culturally and linguistically responsive practices.

Berg is a new-educator mentor in Madison, Wisconsin.