Region 10 & Alaska Native T/TA
Conference Call
Transcript
February 15, 2006
Moderator: Christy Cox
Christy Cox:
Great. Well welcome everybody. This is Christy Cox, the Early Learning and Literacy Content Specialist with Region 10 training and technical assistance office. Here in this office we support the administration for children and families serving Region 10, Idaho, Alaska, Oregon and Washington, Head Start and Early Head Start grantees as well as the Alaska native programs with Region 11 or the American Indian Alaska Native program branch.
I'd like to welcome everyone and do two quick reminders. If your phone isn't already on mute, if you could please mute and pressing star 6 is one way to mute it if your phone does not have a mute option already on it. The other comment I would like to make is that if you are uncomfortable asking questions or participating in the phone call that's absolutely okay. I participate in conference calls and I'm very hesitant to ask my questions and usually end up calling the person back after the phone call and that is definitely…
Christy Cox:
You can e-mail (Renee Andrae) any questions or comments that you have throughout this presentation so please feel free to do so and also please feel free to jot those comments down for later reflection or later conversations. I'm very open to that and would hope that you would contact me if you had more, wanted more information.
Okay. We're going to get started. I'm looking at the agenda today. I hope that you have had a chance to download a copy or have a copy of Steps to Success: Decisionmakers Guide there with you. It would be most helpful and if you don't have it there in front of you maybe you can do some scurrying and try to get one. We will be going mostly over that Steps to Success: Decisionmakers Guide and what will happen before we go through the guide is to actually talk a little bit about what Steps to Success is so that you know what you're making decisions about.
So I'd just like to overview the structural design of the Steps to Success curriculum. This is the curriculum that the Head Start bureau has created. The Steps to Success curriculum is all about trying to support management and mentor coaching efforts at the Head Start and Early Head Start level. It's, this is the Steps to Success instructional tool is really designed to help focus around the skills of mentor coaching, the skills of coaching are a lot like reflective practice which you may already be doing in your program to some degree or other.
The other part of Steps to Success is that it has an early literacy content focus. And I believe that these two strands, the skills of mentor coaching strands and the skills about content area language and literacy are quite distinct and can be pulled apart depending on the needs of your program. So keep that in mind as we're talking about this and going through the decisionmakers guide and also as I talk through the Steps to Success curriculum. It's built into four units. The first unit is called Building Relationships to Promote Child Literacy Outcomes and it overviews mentor coaching skills like establishing trust and communication, clarifying roles and expectations between mentors and protégées or mentors and mentees.
If you're program doesn't already have a mentoring system it may be a chance for you to think about that at this time. What roles might a mentor have that would be similar or different than a supervisor? Also that first unit talks a lot about cultural sensitivity, also about adult learning theory and different learning styles. So as I said earlier in these Steps to Success curriculum materials the Head Start Bureau has built in a content specific area around literacy. So while these materials are trying to help programs to train and create and support mentors by lots of, in lots of different ways so that their skills can be used in the program with new teachers or new home visitors or what have you, there's also a literacy content.
For example, book knowledge and appreciation, print awareness and concepts of print are covered in that first unit. The second unit of Steps to Success is titled Observation and Analysis. The mentor coaching skills strand talks about conducting objective observations, examining classroom observation tools that you might already use. What are you using when you go, when a supervisor or a mentor goes into a classroom? Is that observation tool simply a running record of everything that happens in the room? Is it specific? Is the observation goal set by the supervisor the mentor? Or is the observation goal set by the person being observed?
So this second unit focuses a lot and almost intensively on observation and doing intentional observation with staff between mentors and protégées. The literacy component of unit 2 is early writing and alphabet knowledge. Unit 3 is about reflective practice and it builds onto the ideas covered in Unit 2 about doing objective observations. But once those observations are done how is the information communicated to the protégée or the person being observed?
So the mentor coaching skills in Unit 3 are very much about planning thoughtful, reflective conferences, getting together with that person that was observed and helping them and guiding them through the process of reflecting on their own practice. It also focuses on using journals or dialog journals as well. The literacy content area for Unit 3 is all about oral language development.
Unit 4 is focused around using child assessment data and if you were on last month's phone call with Gene Gousie this unit coincides very directly with what that conversation was focusing around the interplay between screening, assessment, curriculum planning and looking again at child outcomes. Unit 4 does an excellent job of focusing at using data about your students and about your children to inform instruction and planning. Unit 4 goes step by step through a process helping mentors to become experts at using assessment information to plan instruction so that those mentors can go ahead and help their protégées do the same thing.
And on the literacy content strand of Unit 4 they focused on phonological awareness. So there's an overview on the Steps to Success curriculum in the four units. There was also a protégée Journal and there is also this Decision Makers Guide which we are looking at today. You will actually, you meaning all grantees in all of the regions around the United States, will be receiving this curriculum in the springtime.
And in these packets you will be receiving four facilitators guides and then there are four for mentors, the people that would actually be mentoring other staff.
There are four protégée journals, two Decision makers Guides, and two Professional Development Plans and these two I think are the keys to the excellence of this curriculum: four DVDs and four VHS for tutored video instruction. And having actually gone through them [the videos] a number of times myself each time I've gone through them I'm feeling more and more confident about the content and the intentionality of the creators. The people that have built this Steps to Success mentor coaching curriculum and instruction guide have done a really thoughtful job of putting together the elements of reflective practice, trust and relationship building, using assessment strategies and they've done this in such a way that they're showing plenty of examples around Early Head Start, again this is birth to five, a zero to five. They've really done a careful job of putting together the materials in a way that's most helpful, most open-ended, most practical for programs.
So they've tried to design something that is going to be flexible and pertain to individual program needs. Along with the physical print materials and the tutored video instruction DVDs and VHSs there are also online materials that you can access. On the agenda I did put the URL as www.steps-net.org. And on that website there are all kinds of resources and materials. I highly recommend that you gift yourself 15 or 20 minutes to go there and click around on all the buttons just to see what's there.
I definitely believe in that hands on approach and I think giving yourself the time to play around and see what's available there may be worth your while to see, get a better picture of what is online, the resources available to you there as well as what some other programs might be doing. I also want to highlight, I have two people I think on the call (Sherry) and (Kim) from Idaho who I think have been using the online discussion board. They've been posting comments and questions as they had gone through a pilot study of the Steps to Success curriculum. So they were a piloting group. So if you want to step on there you can look at the discussion that's going on between myself, (Ruai Gregory) in Idaho and then many of the participants from the Idaho pilot group. So I'd just like to applaud them and give them some mention because they've been using a lot of time and energy to study this area.
I had built in some pause and reflection time. I would like to give you a minute to write down questions, think about what I've shared with you, look or ask yourself if you need some clarification if something didn't make sense. So please take this full minute, give yourself the opportunity to think back on what you heard and write down any questions or thoughts that you have that pertain to your own programs, your own staff.
So we're going to move onto, we're going to do kind of a walk through of the Decision Makers Guide. So if you have that in front of you go ahead and pull it out. If you have it in front of you on screen go ahead and pull it up. You might want some sticky notes, just a pad of paper, whatever works for you. I usually work with my highlighter and multiple sizes of sticky notes to help me get through something like this because I know that there are areas that I want to come back to. So I'm going to start just on page 1 at the preface.
So the first paragraph just kind of lays it out for you that the intent of this Steps to Success: Decision Makers Guide is for Head Start leaders, managers, policymakers. It's trying to help you build a system that's going to provide your staff with the resources and support that they would need to succeed. If the mentoring is something that you're already using then this is a way for you to reflect on how it's going.
And if you don't have a formal mentoring process already built into your structure or into your program this guide is to help you think about how that might work. So building a mentor coaching system can really help you focus on some professional development especially in an individualized way, in a way that helps staff develop from wherever they're at and then move forward and grow in that way increasing or improving outcomes for our students and families.
I think something that should definitely be said is that while these Steps to Success curriculum tools were built and do have some structure there's no, and it says here at the end of this page 1 that there isn't a one size fits all approach and as with all Head Starts we all have our own individual needs and strengths and opportunities and challenges that we carry with us and have around us. And I think that in any case this is a chance for you to think about those individual needs and how mentoring might help you to either strengthen existing strengths or to strengthen weaknesses in your program.
If you go to page 2 please, I'd just like to highlight again that there is some information there about Steps to Success. It explains that it's an early literacy and mentor coaching system or design and all it is, is it's meant to support ongoing mentor coaching initiatives that you may have or that you may want to have in your program. A colleague of mine really felt strongly to make this distinction, a strong distinction between the skills of mentor coaching that are highlighted and then the literacy piece. If literacy is something that you don't feel is that it's something you need to focus on but you would like to have, offer more mentoring in your programs, please pick that part out for yourself and focus on that part that you need.
There's a number of different reasons that mentor coaching system (on page 2) why you might develop a mentor coaching system in your program, those are questions and thoughts to consider for yourself but there is a really lovely quote that I'd like to read from a mentor coach in a Head Start program. She said "Our mentor coaching system is an investment in our staff; our teachers now see themselves as real professionals. They're proud of their work and as a result our retention rates have improved significantly"
So even in that just short statement you hear things about retention rates improving, you hear about teachers viewing themselves more professionally, you see that that is an investment, the time and energy spent on mentor coaching it has the payoff down the line with staff, with children and with family.
On page 3 it lets you know what's going to happen throughout the guide. It talks about how you might select a model for mentor coaching in your program. It talks about finding financial resources and I would also say not necessarily only financial but resources in general that means personnel, time and energy, materials, it talks on number three about selecting mentor coaches. How do you pick the mentor coaches for your program?
Part four looks at orienting and training mentor coaches. And part five focuses a little bit on linking the early literacy mentor coaches to what's already happening in your program systems. So turn to page 4. And asking yourself the question "If I was going to have a mentor coaching model in my program, what would it look like?" And if you already have a mentoring program you would ask yourself, "How well the mentor program is structured in my program and is that structure working?" Is that model doing what we had hoped it would do?"
This page 4 lays out a few of the different considerations when you're choosing a model. It asks you to think about your own program philosophy. It asks you to think about the capacity, organizational capacity, how large is your facility? How many staff people do you have that could be mentors? How many potential protégées or incoming staff do you have that might need mentoring?
What kind of financial and/or personnel resources already exist or would need to be found? This guide, if you go to page 5, it selects three mentor coaching models that are most prevalent around the United States. However, I would really like to take the time here to recommend that these are three and by any means, phase 3 could be integrated or become hybrids of something that may already have. The first suggestions that they have of the three commonly used models of mentor coaching is, starting on page 5, is that the supervisors are mentor coaches.
And this model you may, their supervisors are already in programs and so in this way you don't have to find new people. However, this may add new roles and responsibilities onto existing supervisors. I'd also like to take a minute and share with you, I'm pulling this information out of Putting the Pro in Protégée. I'll refer to it throughout the rest of the presentation. There is a guide here, a small chart that delineates the supervising role versus a mentor's role and I would just like to read through a few of those for you.
A supervisor's role may be to rate employees' behavior and evaluate overall job performance so we're talking about evaluation. Mentors on the other hand may act as confidantes that work with protégées to improve their job performance and they do this by developing close and intimate relationships with that person. These two things sound very different. And here's another contrast. Supervisors often observe employees in relationship standards. Whereas a mentor may go in to observe a protégée or a mentee on a more personal or individualized level, that the protégée may have chosen a goal and that mentor is helping them meet that goal.
So those are two very different types of observations or reasons for observation. One, a supervisory role and one a mentorship role. So I'd like to point that out when you start thinking about the possibility of using supervisors and mentor coaches and that you give sufficient thought to the idea that those supervisors will have to switch hats. And that they would want their staff to know that they were maybe wearing.
Another commonly used model is the mentor coach as mentor only. And this maybe where you choose someone in your staff and they take on the full role of mentor and they mentor a number of different people or that you hire someone outside of your organization to come in and help you with that role.
It suggests that when you're adding this extra layer of staff and this is the part that I'd like to emphasize throughout that it needs to be carefully defined, the roles and responsibilities of the mentor coach and the supervisor if you have mentor coaches that are, that's all their duty is then to be clear with everyone involved what the roles of that person are versus the supervisor or versus the manager. So if you're considering that idea that you would prefer to have supervisors remain supervisors and mentor coaches be something separate that those roles be really clearly delineated.
The third model that most Head Start often uses is this peer teachers as mentor coaches. And myself coming from a background of the National Writing Project and this motto of "teachers teaching teachers" I appreciate this model. It's one where you may have a more advanced or more experienced teacher in the role of mentor. And this happens a lot informally. And again speaking with some colleagues someone made the comment that we ask our staff to show new people the ropes all the time.
We may even be asked "can you mentor this person, this new person that's new in your staff?" And I think we do that without giving the chance and opportunity for those people that we requested to be mentors to reflect on what mentoring is and to receive training on being a mentor. If you ask somebody to "show them the ropes" or "take them under their wing," that may mean showing them where the bathroom is, helping them to use the protocol guide or to show where the nearest emergency pamphlet is.
So when we say "take them under your wing" or "be a mentor" or "show them the ropes" I think that we are assuming a lot about what we may be asking our staff people. And so these peer teachers, and this applies to all of the areas that we're talking about that the intentionality and the time and the energy that you are all spending right now on the phone thinking about this will help down the line if you do end up making changes to what you are already doing or adding a new layer of mentoring into your program.
So this intentionality being very careful and supporting this kind of program I think is a key step in making it successful. That by asking somebody to be a mentor that it's clear what your asking, that your dreams for that mentoring program had been well established.
I'd like to go onto page 7, this Finding Financial Resources of Early Literacy Mentor Coaching. I'm jut going to highlight a few of the resources that are mentioned here. And I'd also like to read through the quote that's listed there.
It says "our mentor coaching system is an investment in our staff. Our teachers now see themselves as real professionals. They're proud of their work and as a result our retention rate has improved significantly." This is the quote that I read earlier and I think that that idea about investment in our staff is definitely something to keep in mind when you're talking about funding or financial resources.
In the paragraph of pursuit, where it says pursuit there is a website that's listed in the childcare information center. It's there in the middle of the paragraph. I want to make sure that you are able to see that and that the place to start looking, if you're looking for additional funding or resources to fund a mentor coaching initiative in your program. It goes through some coaching of be persistent, keep looking. If you don't find what you're looking for initially in funding resources keep looking. I'm on page 8 now where it says partnerships and I would like to highlight this area.
In Idaho, I was working with three different grantees when we did the piloting of the Steps to Success curriculum and the idea of those three areas working together, those three grantees working together made it very possible for the training to happen. Think about what partners you might have near you that you could work together with in terms of developing a successful mentoring program or revisiting your current mentoring program and expanding it or improving it.
Under the local and/or state foundations, still on page 8, I'd like to highlight another website that you might go through for more information. Again, under that local and/or state foundations it says filings to many regional associations of grant makers at and then there's an FD&C Century dot org.
We also suggest, on page nine, that you look to some local sources. None of this is new to you so I'm going to jump through this. I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see those websites however. So we're moving onto page 10, this is in selecting and matching mentor coaches. And this is a chance for you to really think about what would a mentor coach do in your program or in the program that I work with? And you're thinking about what are the characteristics of a mentor coach?
You want them to have professional knowledge and skills and in that sense you want them to have a deep understanding of teaching, teaching theory and also about if you have a content area specific like literacy that they know a lot about oral language, about reading, writing, about the merging stages of those areas. A mentor though however they may be excellent in the classroom, they may be a master teacher of zero to three, however that master teacher may not necessarily make the best mentor coach because they also need to have the skills to apply your knowledge with adult learners.
And I think that is what these Steps to Success materials offer training guides to support these people that I'm asking to be mentors. They help answer "How can I give them the skills that they may lack or that they may need to develop because they already know what they're doing in the classroom?" I want them to help share and develop those strengths in other people and so this functional skill, this idea of working with adult learners and with people in the program is what Steps to Success is best at.
So again I go back to that idea of when we ask our staff "hey, you know what, can you take the new hire under your wing?" What does that mean? How is that person going to take the person under their wing and what are they going to do for that person?
So by being intentional and thoughtful about those skills it may help both parties involved, both the mentor and the mentee. And finally one of the other major areas that you want to think about when you're selecting mentors for your program, there's a nice quote on page 11. It comes from a piece of research and it says "in selecting a mentor candidate you should consider two issues only. Capability, what the person can do and personality. And of these two personality is by far the most important.
Over 87% of all people failed not because of capability but because of personality." So you want to carefully think about who would make good mentors in your program and then help them build up their capabilities, their mentor coaching skills or their language or literacy content area knowledge if that's something that is a weakness.
I would like to return your focus on page 11 it talks about the selection process, how you pick mentors. The Putting the Pro in Protégée well it maybe something that's on your shelf and you haven't taken a look at it. The more time I spend with it the more I realize that it's a fantastic resource because it highlights real programs, real mentorship and protégée relationships, real struggles and real applications of what we're talking about today.
There's an excellent matrix at the end of the Pro in Protégée that highlights the organizational structure of mentoring programs. For example, in Pennsylvania they talk about how the mentors and the protégées are chosen, who they are in the program.
For example, some protégées are new teachers, some protégées simply move from one position to another. Some protégées or mentors have to apply so you have to be very invested in the protégée experience and also the mentor as well in some cases. In other cases it's mandatory that all new staff will absolutely go through a protégée and mentorship relationship. So if you're curious about how other people and other agencies are using mentoring I would steer you right to the Pro in Protégée which is a free document through the Head Start Bureau.
If you turn to page 14 I think that this does a nice job at showing what some of the specific concrete activities that you might ask a mentor to do in your program. This is a sample job description that the Head Start Bureau has put in for your review. It' s a way for you to think about who these people might be, what qualifications you might want of them in the ideal world so that you can start thinking about how to create or develop or support a system with qualified staff .
The specific activities one through six - when you say "take me under your wing" or "show them the ropes," this is what this means. So it does a nice job of making that vague statement more actionable, something that you can act upon.
We've gone through three areas in this mentor coaching Steps to Success guide and I would like you to have a chance to write down questions in selecting a model, questions about resources, and comments about selecting mentor coaches for your program. Those are the three areas that we've covered and I'd like to give you a minute to think about that and ask questions of yourselves and your programs. So we'll take a moment to let you do that.
Okay, I hope you had a chance to write down some thoughts or some reflections for yourself. I have to take a comment or sidestep for a moment and just speak about myself personally, having spent the majority of my time in the classroom being a very firm constructivist and believing that I've already had a lot of time to be spending with these materials in terms of the steps to success curriculum, even this guide, decisionmakers guide have been through many times and have been building my own understanding of its content and so I just wanted to make sure that you are having the opportunity to build your own understanding and make it useful for you. So I hope that the brief pauses while quiet and silent that they're a chance for you to think about what we're thinking about and do it in a quiet way without somebody talking at you.
We're going to go and take a look on page 16; I just wanted to highlight some of the areas of orienting and training mentor coaches. Again this goes back to this very critical key idea that while you may be asking staff to mentor or act as mentors the question is are you giving them enough support and enough training to do that job well and to help them succeed?
Have you had a chance or have you made the goals and expectations of the mentoring program explicit? Meaning have you written them down? Have you had conversations with people that will be involved and stakeholders that will be playing different roles in the program? Have you had a chance to look through the Pro in Protégée book and look at how other programs are doing it so that you can get as many different ideas from as many different sources as you have time and energy for?
Another area is this emphasis on the content focus on the Steps to Success. And then the idea that different teachers have different levels of content area knowledge and so if you're wanting an early literacy focus for mentor coaching in your program, that that would be something to really consider is "which of my mentors have that kind of content area background knowledge?" And if they have that content background knowledge are they also good mentors? But if they're good mentors but they don't have the content knowledge how am I going to help them achieve that? How am I going to help them gain that knowledge so that they can pass it on to protégées and to the people that they're working with?
This is all about the Steps to Success curriculum that's going to be at your doorstep in the early springtime so you're ending up with a bunch of different new materials that focus around the skill building of mentorship and early literacy.
On page 17 it talks about addressing the needs of the mentors that you have hired or that you have chosen or that have applied and in the Steps to Success there is a lot of self assessment and there's a lot of asking mentors to look at their own practice not only as literacy content people but even more so as mentor coaches. It's asking them to think about their own development as professionals and to help them grow in those areas that they identify themselves.
Your mentors that mentors need just as much support, we all need mentors in different areas. We're all closer to expert in some areas and closer to beginners in other areas of our life and those mentors need resources and ongoing support in the same way that you would expect them to work with their protégées or mentees. So in considering some type of mentorship program or your current mentorship program the question is "am I giving enough resource and support to those mentors and if I'm not what do I need to do to help them?"
One way that you might do that is by establishing a mentor library and that would be looking at videos that you probably already have laying around your areas. Maybe they've kind of been distributed and they've been lost track of. You probably have for example, Putting the Pro in protégée but the question is where is it? You might have the leader's guide to the outcomes - where is that? You might have the Circle training or the STEP training guide somewhere but where is it? And just maybe putting a place or a section of your office together that really focuses on those mentoring skills or that works on professional development or the reflective practice process. And making a place where mentors or persons that act like mentors in your program can go for help and for support when there's no one, nobody physically available to help them they've got some written or video available.
In that Establish a Mentor Library section on page 17 they also highlight again the website, the www.steps-net.org. And I would just recommend giving yourself a chance to just go click around and see what's there. On pages 18 and 19 this lays out some of the exact same things that we are talking about, about helping to formalize a relationship, helping to formalize a mentoring and protégée expectations and roles so that it's not a 'show them the ropes' kind of mentoring it's a 'I'm here to support you in these specific goals and areas and this is how we can do it.' This is a sample agreement that a mentor coach and a protégée might use together so that everybody is on the same page and everybody understands what's expected of the situation of the relationship.
The last section that I'd just like to highlight briefly is on page 20 it's section 5 and it's about integrating this mentor coaching into existing management systems. Think about your record keeping and reporting systems. What are those like already? Do you have mentors that are keeping track of their visits with protégées? If not then this gives you a chance to think about how that would work.
What kind of ongoing monitoring would need to happen so that the collection of data, this is page 22, so the collection of data is ongoing and that spot checks are being made and that mentor coaching program is being supported and supervised? On page 23 it highlights the self assessment process. And self assessment to me just really ties into the whole push towards making decisions using data. Data-based decision making. So what have we collected? What do we know about our mentoring programs so that we can either continue what we're doing because it's really working or make some changes?
I'd like to highlight for you a great bank of self assessment questions on page 23. It starts just about 3/4 of the way down the page and it says as your team collects, processes information they may want to find out if the project is operating as planned. They may ask questions such as "were the mentor coaches hired? What type of training did they receive, etc.?" I wanted to highlight that area for you that maybe something to use especially for existing mentor programs. You could ask yourself and your staff those questions to help you assess how well it's going.
And then just as we finish up, page 24, helps you also think a little bit about things you might look at if you're doing assessments and then again planning using that data you've collected to be planful and mindful of future efforts towards mentoring.
We've gone through this giant overview of something that could be very monumental, it could also be very grass roots starting with just one teacher and one protégée but the idea I think here is that you're looking at individualizing staff development and that this mentoring is a possibility for that to happen. The Steps to Success curriculum will be yours to use as you will, a tool to help you succeed in individualizing professional development for people in your program.
Pages 26 and 27, may be a great way of overviewing the Decision Makers Guide with people who were not on this phone call because it outlines each of the areas that we talked about however briefly so that they can see kind of a full picture in terms of planning.
If you slip through the last few pages, these are just samples for interaction records, recordkeeping, a way for you to track what's happening for mentors or protégées in the program or in future efforts towards mentoring. So I'm going to give you a minute for you to think about those last two sections. One was specifically about training, how you might train mentors and offer them support and resources and the last was about linking this mentor coaching effort into your management system.
So we'll take a minute for you to think about how that might work or how that already works and might work better. And then we have about 10 minutes for questions and comments. So I'll leave a minute of silence and then we can start with questions you might have.
I would love questions or comments that people have. What were you thinking? What did you notice as we went through the decisionmakers guide?
Woman:
Yeah. I have a question. This is (Liz) in Boise, Idaho.
Christy Cox:
Hi Liz.
Woman:
Hey is there going to be a regional training scheduled besides the pilot program you did in Eastern Idaho?
Christy Cox:
Yes there are definitely possibilities, there is a roll out letter that is being crafted as we speak, has been rolling around about trying to figure out how best to individualize this kind of training so that the most people can get the most benefit from it. So yes there is a number of different models for getting training. I don't know if that answered your question specifically enough.
Woman:
I wanted to know specifically if you had chosen dates for when you were going to be providing training on the curriculum itself.
Christy Cox:
No. Specific dates have not been planned; however this is a good chance to think about what would work well for you because I am very open to participating in cluster meetings and/or trainings with your program itself. Based on my experience with the pilot program this is a pretty in depth curriculum. We spent four full days going through it and that was fairly rushed. However, I believe that it was also sufficient.
So that's something to kind of consider and think about if you wanted to train some trainers in you program that's definitely something that could happen if there are some people that you feel like would be really willing to go through this either with myself or with one of the TA specialists in your state. They can also go through it individually without some kind of outside TA support because the materials are very guided and very systematic so that's also a possibility. So dates have not been set however we can set some if you want to give me a call (Liz).
Woman:
Christy how do we get a hold of you specifically if we needed or felt we needed on site training or local training or maybe a group of us?
Christy Cox:
I can be reached at 206-615-2704 and I will also give you my e-mail. It's in all lower case. ccox@acf.hhs.gov.
Christy Cox:
The T/TA ACF website also has our contact information. Okay? So that's another place where you can find my name and you can also see my picture which is not the most flattering image but not the worst either. So thank you (Cheryl Lynn). I appreciate that question.
Is anybody out there already using a mentor model?
(Melissa Hernandez):
This is (Melissa Hernandez) from the Riverhead Head Start and I'm actually the mentor coach here for our program. And I think it's a wonderful program. I love my job. I think the way we've got it set up is really neat. We've got great communication between me and - well earlier we were talking about that really distinct line between a supervisor and a mentor coach when you do have a mentor coach. And it's interesting because as a mentor you have to go in and mentor them and sometimes that supervisor feels like they're the bad person because they have to go in and request a change and then the mentor coach comes in and is the one that helps get to make that change.
So there is really that distinct line between a supervisor and a mentor coach. Does that make sense?
Christy Cox:
That makes perfect sense. I appreciate you kind of highlighting that again but those are two different roles(Melissa Hernandez):
They are and what I love about how we've set up our program is every Thursday we meet with the coordinator, the center based specialist which is the supervisors and myself and the disability person and we just talk about each classroom and see where we can mentor whether it's specific things that a teach needs or if it's a new employee or there's a specific (unintelligible) that needs help. So I love that as a team we come together and really figure out as a whole how that mentor coach can really provide support. So I hope that helps.
Christy Cox:
Thank you. Would you be willing to be contacted if people wanted to talk to you more about that?
(Melissa Hernandez):
Absolutely. My number here, actually let me get, we've got a toll free number here so it's 1-866-753-0951 and my extension is 112.
Woman:
Christy this is (Carolyn) in Southern Oregon.
Woman:
I'm wondering if you can outline for me the differences between this new curriculum and the one that we've had in the past Putting the Pro in Protégée.
Christy Cox:
I think that this curriculum - thanks that's a great question - this Putting the Pro in Protégée I think is an expanded version of the decisionmakers guide. So this Putting the Pro in Protégée highlights some of the areas that you would need to think about if you had a mentoring system or a mentoring program. I believe that the difference is that Steps to Success is an actual curriculum or a training that you would go through with mentors and/or protégées especially specifically looking at how does someone acquire or how do I help someone acquire mentoring skills or reflected practice skills?
Woman:
This is (Cheryl Lynn) in Southern Oregon. I also just have kind of a, just kind of looking at it from the staffing angle. So if you were to have it formalized, we have something probably a little less formal than this but if you have a formalized mentor coaching system how many protégées can a mentor coach reasonably and really work with at a time? Do you have a theory?
Christy Cox:
I definitely have some theories about that. I don't think that you can have a whole bunch of time go past and meet quarterly. So I think you want to make sure that if you have a mentor that has the time to meet with their protégées and that their protégées have the time to meet with their mentors. Most often I have seen this where they have some kind of monthly face to face. So it's kind of a monthly, they see each other, either the mentor is in the classroom with the protégée or the protégée is visiting the mentor's classroom or and this can be applied to also home visiting to bus drivers to new parents in the program.
I don't want to address it only to teachers. We can think outside that box and think that there's a mentor for pretty much every role that happens in Head Start. But there's that option of seeing people face to face but then following up with things like e-mails or phone calls in between those monthly face to face times. So then you just kind of calculate the hours and see how much time is in a month and how much time does that person need for prepping and being thoughtful in the mentoring that they're doing.
Some programs have 10 of the 10 protégée mentors and some have more and less.
Woman:
Christy this is (Anne) and (Cherilyn) in Tacoma, Washington.
Woman:
Hi. We, our system's a little different and I think we're very lucky that we have, we're part of the school district. And so we do have a kind of a blend of the two. We have supervisors who also provide some teaching strategies and support that they basically monitor. And then we also have mentors who provide similar support to the classroom but because they are in the same union as the teachers are there is sometimes a little question about whether or not the teachers want the mentors come into their room and give them feedback when they basically are colleagues.
They have a little problem. Sometimes if the supervisor wants something specific to happen they can help the mentors to go in the room and help with a certain activity or strategy but a lot of the time it's got to be the classroom staff that asks for help from the mentors. And then sometimes the mentors even get stuck just teaching in the classroom because the lack of subs that we have in the district right now. So ours is a little bit of a few things and that's the one big thing and I wondered if any other programs had that issue of mentors being at the same level as who they're mentoring.
I guess nobody else does.
Christy Cox:
Yeah, I was just waiting for that info too, to come out. I don't, I didn't hear anything.
Man:
Each of these roles, this is (Gene), each of these roles that the mentor could play is fraught with and comes with some advantages and some disadvantages and that's one of them that plays it out that way. I mean certainly this whole supervisor, mentor, protégée relationship has got to be carefully thought through because any one, you can set up dynamics whereby the mentor is then the designee of the supervisor and that really can undermine the whole relationship with the protégée. So I think the careful thinking about the relationship and the roles and responsibilities in the first place and then of course finding staff who can somehow navigate the gray areas and work cooperatively together.
Christy Cox:
I agree with you completely. That's great. Thank you everyone. I appreciate very much your time and energy in phoning in and participating and by participating I mean using that kind of listening and I hope that something during the phone call helps you either make planful decisions or get in contact with somebody that you haven't talked about this with for a while or think about something giving you the chance and space to think about this in a way you haven't maybe had in the past. (Melissa) if you're still on thank you so much for your contact info.
And I am very open for phone calls and happy to receive e-mails. When you do end up with the Steps for Success materials on your doorstep and you're wondering kind of what to do with them and where to go I'm really happy to listen and help you think through your planning stages for that as well.
So thank you everyone. I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday.
END