Mentoring Matters
By Jean B. Wiley

Are you anticipating your first day of your first year of teaching? Are you an experienced teacher, but new to your school district? Are you a lead teacher, department head or staff development facilitator responsible for the mentoring program in your building or district?

A wealth of practical tools for all of you are just a click away at the PREP Center at www.prepcenter.org PREP stands for Practical Resources for Education Professionals, and the PREP Center offers terrific resources via professional development opportunities as well as through the information housed on the website.

About the PREP Center. Intermediate District 287, with district offices in Plymouth, MN, is the home of the PREP Center and www.prepcenter.org Intermediate District 287 partners with 13 suburban school districts in the Minneapolis West Metro area in many ways, including organizing the multidimensional staff development program known as the PREP Center.

The PREP Center doesn't compete with school or district staff development efforts. We aim to collaborate with schools and school districts to create a network of professionalism, alleviate feelings of professional isolation and enable pooling of resources. We offer workshops, host relevant coursework opportunities and national speakers and act as a clearinghouse of best practices.

A mentoring center. As we know, mentoring is the practice of establishing a personal relationship between an experienced teacher and a new teacher for the purpose of imparting professional instruction and guidance. It benefits not only the mentee, but the mentor, the school system and the teaching profession as a whole. The instruction and guidance that mentors offer can cover a wide range of topics, from building an educational philosophy to where to find the staff restrooms.

Click on "PREP Talk" at www.prepcenter.org and select "Mentorship" from the drop-down menu and you'll find a section on mentoring, with information and practical tools organized into four headings:

• Mentoring Assessment This section includes a self-assessment checklist for potential mentors, a definition of mentoring, a short list of common problems found in mentoring programs (as well as ways to solve them) and a list of ways to help mentees develop a teaching philosophy.
• Mentoring Research
  Here you'll find citations and statistics that reinforce the value of mentoring, especially mentoring's effectiveness in reducing teacher attrition rates.
• Mentoring Resources
  This section features a survey that asks mentees to evaluate the mentoring experience, a lengthy first-day-of-school checklist of items with which a mentee might need assistance, a list of discussion questions that mentors can use to hone their mentoring skills and a bibliography of titles that can help mentors to improve.
• Motivation
  This section features a survey about school culture, tips for praising mentees effectively and discussion questions designed to boost motivation.

Ready-to-go checklist. A closer look at the mentor/mentee checklist reveals just how practical this tool is. Below are just a few of the categories and items you'll find on the list.

If you're a new teacher facing that first day in the classroom with a mix of excitement and anxiety, an experienced teacher looking for ways to help new members of your teaching team or a district staff development administrator looking for new ideas, then www.prepcenter.org's mentoring resources are just what you need. Investigate the site's abundant resources and use them to help you (and your fellow teachers) be your best in the classroom from the very first day of the school year. Remember – we teachers are all in this together!

There's much more to the PREP Center's website than mentoring. Visit www.prepcenter.org for checklists, discussion topics, self-assessment surveys, research and other resources for leadership and collaboration, teacher morale, goal setting and other professional development topics.

Jean B. Wiley is Teaching and Learning Division Secretary at the PREP Center.

August/September 2004, Vol.35, No.1