Effective Practices: Teacher Onboarding & Mentoring
Gleaning from our experience working with small schools and organizations for over six years as a group and decades as individuals, we have created a series of documents on Effective Practices that we are excited to offer to our clients.
Each document is focused on a key theme or area that clients often have questions about or need support to improve. Our intention with the Effective Practice documents is to offer maps for our clients and share resources that can serve a wide range of small schools and types of organizations. We intend for these resources to support unique inquiries and journeys while addressing common themes, as communities widen to become more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and just.
Today, we warmly share the next in our Effective Practices series: Teacher Onboarding and Mentoring. In this document, we will share solution-oriented practices that guide school leadership to focus on retention, culture-making, and clear onboarding processes, all of which support new faculty in thriving in their schools.
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It’s common for enthusiastic teachers to join schools but then quickly burn out because of avoidable problems. It is also common for teachers to join a school community that isn’t prepared to welcome them authentically, due to oversights and assumptions embedded in the school’s culture. How can a school set up onboarding and mentoring systems that prioritize clarity and accountability, rooted in strong relationships?
Effective practices to consider
Start by building a culture of trust and accountability. Teaching can be an isolating experience, which leads to burnout. In contrast, being a part of a teaching faculty can be an educational community experience that leads to growth. Make visiting each other’s classrooms a regular practice. Provide opportunities in faculty meetings and throughout the school year for teachers to share ideas, struggles, and successes with each other. Foster accountability, resource sharing, and structured support across grades, departments, and sections. Provide spaces for faculty to ask questions, share ideas, and ponder together.
Other ways to build trust and accountability:
Integrate opportunities for healthy, honest, formative feedback into the school’s meeting rhythm and overall culture.
Provide training and skill-building sessions where faculty can practice offering positive and constructive feedback. Feedback can cause harm without appropriate structures or practiced skills, especially for colleagues working across different identities. Discuss feedback as a faculty, asking them to share with each other what is helpful and what is not.
Create community agreements or aspirations as a school to hold during feedback sessions, supporting the feedback to stay formative and supportive.
Begin with retention, leading to recruitment. Without a system in place to support faculty’s well-being, growth, and development, teachers will not invest in the school community or commit to staying. Consider your school culture as it is today. What is your gesture as a school? Look around and ask: who is in your faculty? Who is not in your faculty? Invest in self-study as an institution. Strive to be honest about the community culture and who may feel welcome, or unwelcome, because of the work being taken up, or because of the conversations that are not taking place. Make your institutional expectations conscious. Communicate them clearly in employee handbooks, faculty meetings, and in all mentorship conversations.
Meet weekly and/or monthly with new faculty as a form of mentoring. Everyone needs a mentor in a new school environment. New teachers will need extra support. How is the school accounting for this? As an institution, decide who is going to receive each teacher when they enter the community. If possible, bring the mentor assigned to a new teacher into the interview process. This will allow for introductions to be made before formal mentorship begins.
Once a teacher has been hired, set them up for success with a Welcome Package. Reviewing this package will be a part of their summer preparation work. It may include such things as an acronym glossary, a school calendar (including monthly mentoring), an introduction to school systems, and a place for them to formulate and share mentoring goals.
Set up weekly meetings between mentors and mentees and a cohort for new faculty to meet monthly in order to connect, share questions, struggles, and inspiration with each other.
The full document (available only to current clients) includes more effective practices and a list of accompanying resources. If you’re a current client and don’t have access to this document, please write to us at connect@almapartners.net for a copy. We also offer 1-hour consulting sessions to go deeper on the content of this document. If you’re not a client yet, book an introductory call with us to learn more!
