Seeing more and more educators acknowledging that we are tooling up for what is actually emergency remote teaching and not online or distance teaching is a relief. I try not to call this online learning because the learning part is an individual experience and outcome (the impact of the teaching), and something I will be discussing in a future post. The goal of my writing is to reflect on the power of working with a community of educators who are responsive and deeply committed to mentoring others. On Friday, April 3rd, The Mentoree facilitated 7 hours of Conversations to Build Capacity, and I feel so proud of our community and leadership team.
The Mentoree was founded to help support teachers, and that is what we did on Friday. We went to a few of our OEMConnect Mentors to provide some guidance on areas around which teachers seemed to be in need of thinking and learning. Our first Conversations to Build Capacity included a variety of offerings:
Janelle McLaughlin led two sessions: Designing Quality Digital Learning and Enabling Teachers.
Ramona Meharg led a session on Supporting Special Needs Students at Home
Michael Derezek shared a lot of Digital Tools
Leigh shared ways to navigate Digital Experiential Learning
Christine Chin presented ways to support French Instruction
Unsurprisingly, my contribution was Learning Outside the Blocks. I sat in on as many sessions as I could to learn from these Mentors and friends. It was a really great day of learning for me. We really do all have something to teach, and we all have some thing to learn. Now is a time when I have many somethings, so I was glad to have gained so much from being a part of the sessions.We are also happy to share that it was a great day of learning for most of our participants.
In our goal to be responsive, we asked for feedback after each of the Conversations to Build Capacity. The overall feedback was very positive. We measured our work against our definition of Mentorship:
We had originally spelled out this acronym in order to differentiate our work in mentorship from some of the other more common definitions. They all seemed to imply that the mentor is a knowledge keeper and the mentee is a vessel to be filled. Our definition came from the process that led to us becoming The Mentoree. The process began with our collaborative inquiry that led us to go from OnEdMentors Connect to OEMConnect to, ultimately, putting that offering under the larger umbrella of The Mentoree. The Mentoree is a collaborative community that promotes professional learning and efficacy through mentorship.
Here are screenshots of the survey results:
Based on this feedback and our reflections, here are some our takeaways and next steps:
We need to host more conversations because they help educators.
We have many Mentors in the community from whom we can learn.
This is a community that can learn from and teach each other.
We need to invite more conversation and will open this notion up to our Mentors at our next Mentor Meet Up in a few weeks.
We need to get the word out to more educators.
We need to think about how can we make this kind of learning more accessible.
We need to survey people about what other offerings they want/need from The Mentoree.
We need to explore ways we could we be doing to be responsive to teacher needs for those who are not yet "connected" online.
What we need to do now is more than bridge the digital divide in our own skill sets. We need to look selfward and connect to ourselves as educators. We also need to connect to and learn from each other, and we need to find ways to connect to our students that bridge the distance learning experience and help students regain some of what we’ve lost through this pandemic- a sense of community, tools to manage and learn, and that feeling that they matter to us.
