Towson University Mentor Teacher

 

I am a proud mentor for Towson University Early Childhood Special Education Pre Service Teachers. As a mentor for two years, I have helped guide pre service teachers through their student teaching as they deepen their educational practices. These student teachers completed a semester of full time mentoring and instruction. This important commitment fulfils the coach standards 1,2, and 3.

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While there are many new learning opportunities for student teachers, the use of technology and new learning tools was imperative to their success, especially in a virtual classroom setting. While mentoring it was imperative that I coach my intern on the uses of instructional technology, in addition to discussing the inequity of access to technology impacts my learners (ISTE coach 3c). While mentoring my most recent student teacher we had to utilize all online curriculum and digital textbook/workbooks due to the Covid-19 pandemic. These digital resources supplied an additional tool for my student teacher to add to her toolbelt to help improve her teaching practices. Being able to navigate and add assignments and google documents to a learning platform is a huge task and learning opportunity! In addition to this foreign task, I transformed my plan book into a google sheet. This online collaboration tool kept me accountable to continue to model and improve my own teaching and organization while assisting in joint planning for her transition into full time teaching. By using a digital shared document to complete our plans during transitioning from student teacher to lead teacher, I could help my mentee feel prepared and supported in reaching not only the goals for the class but her instructional goals as well (ISTE coach 1c). We both were able to edit, link resources and plan simultaneously all while creating an accountability sheet for her advisor. This created a shared vision while sharing our classroom and aided in the coaching process (ISTEcoach 1a).

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This continued opportunity of being a mentor supplied many ways for me to build relationships with my professional community both in the school building, BCPS, and Towson University. In addition Covid19 pandemic lead to greater and deeper conversations regarding equitable, and inequitable use of digital learning tools (ISTEcoach 1b). It was imperative that we planned and considered the appropriate learning tools for students who may not have ample bandwidth, a working school device, and how young digital citizen navigate technology with limited supervision. This component of my capstone has been an invaluable part of my professional learning supplemented by my time in the Instructional Technology program.