Excellence With Equity: A Mentor’s Approach, Part 2

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

In my previous blog, I discussed how working with a mentor can help new teachers focus on students’ assets rather than their deficits. The next layer of mentoring for excellence with equity involves connecting the beginning teachers’ asset-based conversations about identity (their own and students’) with instructional practices that are responsive to these assets.

To provide guidance in this area, our district leadership conducted an extensive project to collect and synthesize student, teacher and community input on instructional practices that they consider to be responsive to the needs of our culturally and linguistically diverse students. The resulting document, “Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Practices in Action,” identifies six research-based, responsive instructional practices to which we, as a district, are committed:

1. Setting high and clear expectations
2. Acknowledging all students
3. Developing self-efficacy
4. Connecting to students’ lives and funds of knowledge
5. Applying academic press (challenge)
6. Valuing and being responsive to racial, cultural and linguistic identities

The “Practices in Action” document was introduced to all new staff on orientation day, and it serves as a core resource for mentors, like me, in our work with beginning teachers. To enhance—and personalize—this learning for new teachers, we also share student video interviews. These videos give teachers the opportunity to hear directly from students about what the practices mean for them and why they are important for creating a supportive, high-quality learning environment for all students in our district.

In subsequent mentoring conversations, we use the document to collaboratively identify an area in which the beginning teacher would like to grow toward refining her culturally and linguistically responsive practice. Over the course of the year, we collect relevant data (for example, recordings of classroom instruction, field notes and interviews with students) that the mentee and mentor use to help the new teacher develop her skillset in the identified practice and build confidence in becoming a reflective and responsive practitioner. 

Specifically, I have found the Teaching Tolerance toolkit for “Two Heads Are Better Than One” and various in-house tools designed for my district’s “Practices in Action” document to be useful in collecting observational data and driving equity-focused mentoring conversations. As a result, I have watched new teachers—who tend to struggle with such common challenges as engaging all students, formatively assessing students’ understanding and preparedness for independent work or clearly communicating high expectations—become thriving teachers who are flexible in their approaches toward student engagement, instruction and assessment.

As they experience success in connecting with students through these practices, early-career teachers develop the skills they need to check their personal biases and maintain the open mindsets necessary to meet the needs of the diverse learners in their classrooms. This key shift, from a limited culturally and linguistically responsive practice to a promising and thriving one, is another key step in cultivating excellence with equity.

Stay tuned for part three of this series! I’ll discuss the third recommendation: guiding beginning teachers toward adopting a restorative approach to student behavior.

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