Week 2 Reflection

It has been an interesting week. I met with my site supervisor and we discussed many issues that our school needs to address. The three issues that we decided on were the tardy policy, increasing parental involvement and the district's teacher mentoring program. She told me to decide on one and the one I chose was the mentoring program. When I first began teaching seventeen years ago, I was very lucky to have my high school drama teacher be my mentor. He was at a different campus but he always made time to find out how things were going for me and helped me out tremendously. Towards the beginning of the school year I was having some issues with one of my 7th grade drama classes. The kids were basically making my life miserable so my mentor teacher came by during his conference period and sat in and observed the class and suggested ideas on how to handle them. Little by little the students realized that I wasn't going to give them the upper hand so they just stopped being discipline problems and let me teach. They ended up really liking my class and became one of my favorite classes to teach. I moved up to the high school in the following year and many of those 7th graders joined drama in high school. They were a very talented group that became very involved in theatre throughout their high school years.
I have heard many horror stories from teachers that had a mentor but basically had to learn everything on their own. As an administrator, I want to make sure that I keep as many of my teachers every year. When teachers are wanting to transfer out of your campus, that does not look good on the principal. Having a great mentoring program will help an administrator make sure that the first year teachers transition into their new job without too many problems. I know that I am where I am because of my first year mentor and I want to make sure that the mentoring program makes our school's first year teachers feel the same way.