Mentors Help Create "Survivors"

Veteran Menomonee Falls teacher Nancy Van Caster and first-year teacher Jodi Donovan display the packets designed by a district team to help the district implement the mentoring program for Initial Educators.

By Joanne M. Haas

The Menomonee Falls School District is performing a “play” every day this school year. It stars the district’s entry-level teachers, their mentors and administrators in a reality drama that’s a bit like “Survivor” meets PI 34.

“It was almost as if we were writing a dramatic play,” said Nancy Van Caster, a 13-year reading teacher at North Junior High School. She spent the summer on a team creating step-by-step guides for teachers and other district professionals about to be affected by the state’s new teacher licensing law, known as PI 34. The law creates three categories of teacher licenses: Initial Educator, Professional Educator and Master Educator. It also shifts emphasis from a course-accredited license renewal system to a performance-based standard.

The Menomonee Falls team, which focused on the Initial Educator phase, became reality after the district was granted a $5,000 WEAC Quality Schools Grant.

The project’s end product was a series of packets, each designed for a different player in the Initial Educator phase -- the entry-level teacher, the mentor, the principal, and others.

“Each packet has its own introduction of your role,” Van Caster said, adding each also includes what the person should be doing when, plus other timelines showing how the work of this person fits in with the work of others. “They are on stage, and working with the Initial Educator.”

Each packet also includes a feedback form that is due back to the grant committee by May. Suggested refinements will be inserted in the final packet versions slated for distribution to the crop of college graduates as Initial Educators in 2004.

“When PI 34 is in place, we will be ready to go,” Van Caster said, adding that the materials will be made available to other school districts.

While many districts may just now be examining the role of mentors as a result of new PI 34 requirements, Menomonee Falls has had its program to train and pay mentors in place since 1997.

Van Caster said once PI 34 was formalized into administrative rules by the Department of Public Instruction, the school district fine-tuned and formalized its existing program – “providing the mentors with definitions of how they fit into PI 34, and some forms to reorganize the paperwork.”

Van Caster said the mentoring relationship of the Initial Educator program is expected to turn into a situation of mutual mentoring.

“Part of the message that we get out is these are the expectations and this is the language that the new teachers will be coming through with,” she said, adding some of the trained mentors in the district do not have the background and training about PI 34 that the new college graduates will have.

“It will be a common learning experience. In some ways, the new teachers will know more about the law (PI 34).”

Van Caster said it is crucial for people to understand that review teams charged with deciding whether a professional development plan has been fulfilled are not involved in hiring or staffing decisions.

“Sometimes it feels a little murky,” she said, adding “nobody wants teachers put in the position of deciding whether a person’s employability will continue with a district.”

Eau Claire: Teamwork by three
Menomonee Falls is not the only school district out in front on the mentoring issue. Another is Eau Claire, which is hosting expanded mentoring training this year thanks to a multi-faceted collaboration.

Fred Poss

“In Eau Claire, we have great collaboration, which is a model we hope other districts can look at and learn from and adapt to their situations,” said Fred Poss, a 34-year veteran Eau Claire English teacher who is vice president of the Eau Claire Association of Educators.

The Eau Claire model includes a Mentor Steering Committee made up of volunteer teachers from the various grades, a district staff developer, the district technology developer, a representative from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, the district superintendent, and an ECAE representative.

“PI 34 will be most successfully implemented when people learn to collaborate as we have,” said Poss, who has worked with mentoring programs for 15 years.

At the base of Eau Claire’s successful mentoring programs and preparations for PI 34 is a three-way partnership involving school staff developer Dick Fields, the UW-Eau Claire’s director of field experience Jill Prushiek, and the ECAE’s representative Poss.

“Twelve years ago, the school board, central administration, and our teachers’ association collaborated to create a two-day training the week before students started school,” Poss said, adding it included mentor training provided by himself and Fields.

This year, the mentoring portion of the training has been expanded, thanks to the donation of time by Fields and Prushiek who have joined Poss in the extra workshops.

The school district provides a $100 mentor stipend, veteran teachers attend two days of training, and UW-EC offers graduate credits for teachers who attend the training and complete a required project this semester.

“Such collaboration is exactly the new way of working together to maximize resources that PI 34 seeks,” Poss said. “Our new staff benefit from not only having a mentor, but a mentor who has two days of in-depth training in mentoring and the law. Our teacher association benefits by collaborating in the three-way partnership. Our new members as well as our veteran staff members receive expanded opportunities to learn and grow and be compensated. Our school district benefits because research clearly demonstrates that keeping new teachers is much more cost effective than having to replace them. Our students and our community benefit from improved student learning in those classrooms. And the university benefits because it is able to make its graduate program even more available to teachers. This is win, win, win.”

The two-day mentor training, the first such joint effort, will be followed by a training for new teachers in classroom management, a winter training on writing a professional development plan (PDP), and a spring training where the PDP will be created.

On another front, Poss used a $4,000 WEAC grant to arrange a one-day training about Chalk and Wire, a software program teachers can use to create electronic portfolios. About 35 people attended the summer workshop that also gave these teachers the skills to help others in their schools learn to use this technology as they proceed with PDPs.

A leader on the mentoring front, Poss was selected four years ago to chair the Initial Educator Work Team and is now involved in statewide dissemination of information and trainings related to this phase of PI 34.

“What we’re trying to do is be a year ahead of time,” Poss said, referring to the many steps in play at Eau Claire to prepare for PI 34. “Our plan is when we hit August 2004, this will be a seamless transition for people, and all of the steps will have been already taken.”

Posted September 10, 2003