Editor’s note: This blog is the final installment in a three-part series that looks at how mentoring can support beginning teachers in cultivating excellence with equity. Find the first part here and second part here.
My previous blog in this “Excellence With Equity” series addresses how new-educator mentors can help beginning teachers develop their strengths in culturally and linguistically responsive practices. This blog focuses on expanding early-career teachers’ critical lens toward advocacy for students and their professional agency in rerouting the school-to-prison pipeline.
Student engagement and student behavior are major topics of conversation with beginning teachers. Our discussions build on the work we have already done:
- identifying strengths and assets;
- understanding how our lived experiences shape our expectations and biases;
- and developing a culturally and linguistically responsive practice.
Once we establish this foundation, we can talk about adopting a social justice lens when issues of disengagement and behavior arise.
As part of our local university’s common reading program, people from all over the area—students, faculty, staff, community members and even members of our local police departments—are reading Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. We’re also discussing how our community can come together and work toward resolving social justice issues. Of particular concern are the disproportionate rates of arrest and incarceration for African-American males (adults and youth) and what we can do to address this phenomenon in a systemic way.
To bring this conversation into our school district, staff in our central office are also reading Just Mercy and engaging in professional learning to take action around implications for our work with staff and students. Mentors, specifically, are working to support beginning teachers in understanding and interacting with students according to the expectations outlined in our district’s new Behavior Education Plan. We are also actively working with early-career educators to develop their restorative approaches to behavior issues.
I have worked with beginning teachers to help them understand students on a more personal—and holistic—level, helping them interpret certain behaviors as means by which students communicate their unmet needs. Together, each mentee and I plan conversations with the student in question or family members, other school support staff or community liaisons. These conversations help paint a bigger picture of the student and aid with designing a plan that works.
Through this process of positive behavior support, I have watched beginning teachers build amazing relationships with students and reengage them in their learning. The important step was for the new educator to have a private conversation with the student, conveying a non-judgmental observation of the behavior in question, asking the student to explain her perspective and then collaborating with the student to make a plan for how to best support her.
In other cases, I have worked with beginning teachers to incorporate restorative justice circles in their classrooms to address students’ needs to express themselves and solve their own problems in collaborative, non-judgmental ways. Other new educators have sought out extra resources and are practicing mindfulness strategies in the classroom with students.
The rationale for all these practices is to teach educators behaviors and self-management strategies that replace the types of knee-jerk reactions that push students out of school and into the prison pipeline. To help beginning teachers understand the pipeline and the implications of the shift from punitive to restorative approaches to behavior, I have found Teaching Tolerance’s “A Teacher’s Guide to Rerouting the Pipeline” to be very useful. In mentoring conversations, this guide has helped me focus a beginning teacher’s attention to one shift at a time—there are five shifts—in terms of how she interprets and addresses behavior issues in the classroom.
Guiding beginning teachers to make that shift from punitive to restorative behavior approaches is perhaps the most challenging part, mainly because behavior is such an emotionally charged issue. Mentoring facilitates the early-career educators’ thinking and provides a calm, rational space for them to objectively assess a situation, reframe their thinking and plan new routes for teaching and addressing student behavior.
By making this final key shift and intentionally drawing students into their learning, instead of removing them from class, beginning teachers are able to build critical pathways that reroute students away from cycles of punishment and toward promising, successful futures. By facilitating this shift for beginning teachers across the district, mentors are helping to cultivate excellence with equity that will have a lasting, positive impact for everyone.
Berg is a new-educator mentor in Madison, Wisconsin.
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