Responsive Mentoring

Book excerpt: Responsive Mentoring: Supporting the Teachers All Students Deserve advocates for a collaborative approach to mentoring that is teacher-centered, scaffolded, and contextualized to teachers’ work. This approach is designed to help teachers across their careers set and meet ambitious instructional goals, while also developing as reflective practitioners who learn in and from their teaching, in order to ensure all students receive a rigorous and engaging educational experience. Mentoring is a highly complex and critical endeavor. To guide mentors’ work, a clear vision for mentoring is coupled with a highly-responsive set of mentoring practices. Recommendations and real world examples help mentors make informed decisions about which practices to use, under what circumstances, and in what combinations, in order to responsively and effectively facilitate teacher learning and development. Concrete and practical advice along with questions for reflection and action help mentors across contexts and levels of experience. A final section outlining intentional and versatile strategies for mentoring-the-mentor ensures that all mentors also have supports to grow as professionals.