The Just ASK December Mentoring Checklist

Each issue of The Mentoring Memo features a mentoring checklist for the current time of the year. The December calendar is now available. These calendars, excerpted and updated from The 21^st Century Mentor’s Handbook, offer suggestions for mentoring actions to support novice teachers and teachers new to the district. When you take a look at them, you will quickly see how useful they are. Be sure to forward them to your mentoring colleagues. Post them or a link to them on your district/school website.

Julie McVicker, Just ASK Senior Consultant, and I are in Fresno, California, for the 2018 California Induction Conference. We are looking forward to spending two days with 400 dedicated mentor leaders from across the state.

We would like to give a shout-out to the conference planning committee members who took on the responsibility for organizing this conference while doing their full-time jobs in districts and county offices of education throughout the Central Valley. They are:

• Fresno County Superintendent of Schools
  Manjit Singh, Rachel Miller, Denise Guerrero, and Tannon Pafford
• Kings County Office of Education
  Lavonne Chastain, Summer Cannon-Headley, and Kim Wright-Burns
• Kern County Superintendent of Schools
  Malaika Bryant
• Merced County Office of Education
  Stacy Shasky and Karla Paul
• Stanislaus County Office of Education
  Christine Sisco, Alison Beech, and Gina Smith

Julie and I are facilitating a session titled “What Do You Do When… ?” This exercise, based on regularly recurring scenarios in mentoring work, is a favorite exercise in our mentoring and induction workshops. This month’s tidbit is an excerpt from The 21^st Century Mentor’s Handbook that features a few scenarios and possible mentor responses generated by mentors from Alexandria City Public Schools, Virginia. The tool of the month is “On My Mind” which is a strategy to use in identifying scenarios a group of mentors would most like to discuss. (Tip: This is a great strategy to use with any hot topic because it allows all voices to be heard and also ensures that time is spent on the issues most people are interested in exploring.)

Thanks for all you have done in 2018 to create cultures for learning and specifically supporting those new to the profession and to your school or district.

Have a grand time doing whatever makes you smile over the winter break!

Paula Rutherford
Author, The 21^st Century Mentor’s Handbook