Mentoring Newsletter
A guide to working with mentees at your school site
October 5th - 18th, 2020
Hello, BPS mentors.
I hope you are well and had a wonderful weekend! This newsletter is packed with NEW information that needs your leadership skills in sharing and guiding your mentees. The state, after further review of our evaluation system for new teachers, updated a mid-year evaluation component. We will focus this newsletter's edition solely on this topic since it applies to about 400 of our teachers.
A few things to keep in mind regarding the mid-year evaluation:
- It only affects instructional staff that have less than one year within BPS. This means ALL teachers newly employed by BPS this year regardless of experience.
- It is formative in nature! The final score on a teacher's mid-year evaluation is NOT utilized in the final score in the new teacher's Summative I or Summative II annual evaluation.
- New teachers, with their evaluating administrator, agree upon which student performance measures will be used to identify student growth.
- The student growth measure rating will comprise 37% of the teacher's mid-year evaluation score. Again, this new element is meant solely as formative feedback to the teacher.
- The mid-year evaluation will occur before the end of the semester, January 15th.
- New teachers will use this same rubric for the mid-year Self-Reflection on ProGOE.
What can you do as your teacher's mentor to support them in the mid-year evaluation?
- Model a strong growth mindset - especially with our most inexperienced teachers. At the New Teacher Academy, we share with our new teachers that most beginning teachers would be in the developing category on the evaluation rubric (IPPAS) at this point in the school year - and that's okay because most of them are developing! With the addition of the mid-year evaluation , please use your upcoming mentoring time to go over the wording differences between developing and proficient on the new rubric addition (see the rubric below). All teachers want to do well, but it's important to call attention to key words in the scoring rubric -- all, most, some, and no, for example -- regarding student growth.
- Share examples with your mentees what would constitute student growth or achievement sources. (See the examples shown below)
- Emphasize appropriate use of formative assessment data (to inform instructional decisions). Discuss what formative assessments you do in your classroom and how you are able to change direction mid-lesson or for the next day if student feedback shows confusion or needing more time to master a standard. Explain what percentage of your students you require to show mastery in order to move on. Many new teachers will hold the entire class back due to a few students struggling with a concept. Explain how the class can move on while supporting those few students by giving individualized support separately. Use stories and examples here as needed.
Our mantras right now should be, “We are all in this together!” and “We can do this!”
As always, thank you so much for being your school's leaders in this mindset. 💚 You are the Heart of Brevard!
-Bridget Reed