A good teacher mentoring relationship is built on trust made through regular connection between the mentor and mentee. With the current state of the world, and specifically in schools, maintaining a strong mentorship relationship is especially important. Mentor and mentee relationships can weather the COVID-19 storm by staying connected, staying consistent, being flexible, and working together.
Ways to stay connected
Your typical routine for connecting, maybe on a prep period or in the school hallway, has most likely been disrupted. Find new ways to connect that work for both of you, such as email or another messaging medium. If you feel comfortable, follow each other on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Even a quick text message can help you stay connected. If possible, subscribe to each other’s classroom information streams or other digital classroom resources. You can see what your mentor/mentee is up to in their classroom and this can give you ideas and spark conversations.
Stay consistent
Now more than ever it is important to carve out time to connect. At school, you may be able to catch each other in the staff lounge, or at a staff meeting, but with distance learning and remote working you won’t have those casual moments of connection. Some of your communication can be done through email or other messaging apps. However you decide to stay connected, set aside time each week to check in with each other. Find a time that you are both able to do a telephone or virtual chat. Even a few minutes of conversation can help you stay connected.
Be flexible with what the mentoring topics are
These are some wild times in education right now. It seems that every few days there is an update to our fluid school situation. Mentoring will not be business as usual, just as school is not business as usual. Mentors and mentees will most likely spend most of their time navigating these new waters. For example, if the mentee teacher was working on engaging students in lessons, that will look a lot different online than it did in the classroom. Some of the topics you were working on together may get set to the backburner while more pressing issues, such as how to do distance learning, are brought forward.
Learn from each other!
This is the first time in anyone’s lifetime that they have taught through a situation like this. Mentors have never navigated this before and won’t have answers or suggestions for all of their mentee’s needs. Mentees are brand new to teaching and many have taken some online classes or had online components of their teaching credential program. Use ideas from other online courses to guide what you do with your own students. Share with each other what is working and what is not. Your relationship may change from mentor/mentee to more like two colleagues collaborating. If it does, then you are doing this right!
However your mentorship relationship is playing out during this global pandemic, try to not put too much pressure on yourself and your mentor or mentee. Stay in regular contact with each other and focus your work on immediate needs. You will both come out on the other side stronger teachers.