Our Goals - Peer Support & Well Being
Our goal in developing Mentoring for All (MFA) is to help all educators at PVNCCDSB experience the peer support of another staff member and to ultimately aid in fostering the well-being of our staff.
Our Progress (so far)
2015 - 2016: Building Foundational Mentorship Skills
We provided optional Mentoring for All training, open to all staff within the board. Jim Strachan helped to lead the learning.
2016 - 2017: Moving from Ideas to Action
We initiated a Mentoring for All steering committee comprised of representatives from each cohort in our board, including:
- Teachers
- Support Staff
- Early Childhood Educators
- Managers
- Consultants
- Principals
One prerequisite to be on the committee was to have taken part in the Mentoring training offered the year prior. To further member’s Mentoring professional learning, MFA committee gathered 3 times throughout the year to collaborate on our vision. We did a book study on Leadership Wisdom by Robin Sharma, and had guest speakers attend each meeting. Members also shared their vision, needs and strategies for next steps to implement Mentoring for All at PVNC.
Additionally MFA committee supported a day of learning with our Math Mentors to support the Renewed Math Strategy. This day helped Math mentors to learn mentoring skills to work with staff in their schools.
The committee acted on feedback regarding the need to create a formal "Mentor Bank" and an application was sent out to all staff at PVNC.
A sub-committee reviewed the applications and mentors were selected to represent all cohorts. The vision is that all new staff, upon hiring, will be matched with a mentor and provided time for job-embedded learning or job-shadowing and debriefing. On-going informal support will also occur.
Impact and Next Steps
We have had a great interest in becoming mentors, from all cohorts at PVNC. The interest and the awareness of the importance of mentorship has increased at our board.
Through conversations from the committee meetings, to descriptions in the mentor bank applications, we see that staff understand that mentorship is a two-way street and that both the mentor and the mentee will benefit from this supportive relationship.
Our next steps include mentor training for our new mentors in our mentor bank, using the Mentoring for All eBook and Bruce Wellman’s Mentoring Matters resource.
Human Resources is creating documentation to give to all new hires that will inform them of our MFA process and align them with a mentor. Release time (when applicable) will be given to new staff and mentors to take part in job-embedded mentoring.
Our MFA committee will meet again in 2017-18 to continue to steer the direction of mentoring at PVNC. One goal is for our committee members to create a Google Classroom to support the staff in their cohort. The online community will be a place to ask questions, share information and build capacity.