Context/Initial Prompt: Please post a response to the questions below based on your readings and prior experiences:
- What needs to be in place for a mentoring relationship to work? For coaching to work?
- How will you know if your mentoring or coaching initiative is successful?
Facilitator Posting:
Class,
Great job with your responses thus far. You all have provided great insights of characteristics that will lead to a successful relationship between a mentor and a mentee. A participant in the discussion brought up a personal experience they had with an ineffective mentor, which I think is worth exploring. If your mentor was providing inadequate support, how would you handle it? Would you let anyone know? Would you confront your mentor about it? Would it be appropriate to go to your administrator or colleagues for help? What other resources are available to help you succeed as a new teacher? How important is a mentor for a new teacher and do you think that it would be possible for a beginning teacher to survive without one?
Curious Facilitator
I think your post to the class had too many questions for the students to adequately address. There were five consecutive questions in that one post. Instead of lumping all of that together, you should consider giving one of those questions to each team within your class. That way all of the questions are addressed in an in depth way and teams get to focus on one particular area of concern. Once teams have been given time to analyze the question and submit a response, summaries from each team can be shared with the group.
ReplyDeleteI'm unsure as to what exactly happened here. Where are the posts made by the students? You didn't really explain what happened.
ReplyDeleteI would also agree that too many questions were asked. If you wanted to ask the number of questions you did, you may wish to re-look the way in which you structured the questions. Put them into a bulleted list and ask for students to answer one or two from the list.
There were far too many questions in the facilitator's post, which makes it hard to process. Also these questions tend to lead to yes/no responses instead of answers with more depth. I would recommend using the last two questions as expansion questions after this post, later in the week. If these questions were written as open-ended ones, it would lead to more discussion as well. Open-ended questions allow the participants to express a variety of opinions.
ReplyDeleteIt seems as if the comment from one of the particpants has lead you off task from your initial prompt. You orginal prompt was focused on what makes a successful mentoring relationship. Then the participants comment about an ineffective relationship led you to a different focus. It seems that you might have been trying to use a generative guide voice in your discussion to take them in a different direction but you went in too many different directions. It is a lot of thought for someone to reflect on during a single post. I think just adding your first question about how you would handle it if your mentor was providing inadequate support would have been enough. That is if you intent was to take the discussion in a different direction. If that wasn't your intention you needed to refocus the group back to the original prompt.
ReplyDeleteRepost:
ReplyDeleteI think the facilitator gave too much to think about to a very sensitive topic. I think it may be difficult for a participant to speak freely on this topic. My suggestion would be to approach the topic by asking the students to give advice to a friend who was in this situation. I would then encourage the instructor to post the other questions to encourage higher levels of thinking or to promote continued discussion.
This is similar to a problem that another instructor had. I think what went wrong was that you may have overwhelmed the class with the number of questions asked in your post. You have asked the class to essentially respond to 6 different questions!
ReplyDeleteIt’s a great extension to the original topic and certainly one worth exploring but it may be more beneficial to students if you paired the questions down to the most important 2 or 3 to focus on. You can also consider other options, like opening a new thread with these provided as extension questions. Ask students to respond to one or two questions. Let them know that they don’t have to respond to ALL of them; that might help them to narrow their focus on one specific answer.
-Julie
Julie I like your suggest of pairing down to the 2 or 3 most important questions. It really is important to pull out what is important and most relevant to the discussion. Maybe the facilitator could even post a different question to teams and allow them to discuss as a team and them summarize discussion for the whole group. This would allow for all questions to be answered in an organized way.
ReplyDelete