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Teacher-to-Teacher
Mentoring Program

A free program that provides new teachers (in their first five years) with a music Teacher-in-Residence who models excellent instruction in an empathetic, non-evaluative and supportive manner.  The program is based on grounded mentoring, an approach where both teachers collaboratively plan lessons, instruct students, and reflect together on student learning and achievement.  The goal is to improve instructional effectiveness and student achievement, and to modify teachers’ capacity to modify themselves.   

Each Home Teacher chooses areas to focus on throughout the residency in their own classroom.  They generate ideas of how the Teacher-in-Residence can help with those areas, incorporating his/her abilities, strengths and resources.  Rather than trying to “fix problems,” the Teacher-in-Residence and Home Teacher mutually create possibilities for long-term growth.  

 

The process of grounded mentoring is based on research that suggests that the only sure way to guarantee that a new philosophy, theory, strategy or technique actually gets transferred to students in the classroom is by coaching the teacher in their own classroom.

                        

                                                      Know and              Ability to         Transfer to

                                                      Understand           Use                  own Classroom

 

Theory                                                90%                 25%                             5%                  

 

Demo                                                  90%                 50%                             5%

           

Practice & feedback                          90%                 90-95%                       5%

 

Coaching                                             95%                 95-100%                     90%

 

(Joyce, B. & Showers, B. 1995.  Student achievement through staff development 2nd ed.)

 

Piloted in 2007-'08 with five teachers (two Home Teachers and two Teachers-in-Residence), the program was expanded to 26 (13 Home Teachers and 13 Teachers-in-Residence) in 2008-'09.