"This is the best book on how to ask for help and search out opportunities if you want to be an effective teacher."
Harry K. Wong, Author
The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher
Take responsibility for your own learning by learning from others.
As a new teacher, you need help! The inspiration and encouragement which mentorship provides is crucial during the first (and toughest) months of teaching. This book gives you all you need to fully recognize and utilize the valuable rewards uncovered throughout the mentoring process.
Thought-provoking and action-generating discussions reveal how to become a proactive protégé, making this book a wonderful resource in the preparation of prospective teachers. A step-by-step approach illustrates the unique perspective of receiving mentorship, and how to make the most of it. Topics discussed include:
- Building trust and clarifying communication
- Identifying who does what
- Learning from watching
- Deciding where to focus your efforts
- Planning your professional growth
Before you can profit from experience, you must acquire it. This book reveals the unique skills necessary to interpret and put to use the guidance, wisdom, instruction, and assistance of a mentor and become a self-empowered, proactive protégé.
Hal Portner is a former K-12 teacher and administrator. He was assistant director of the Summer Math Program for High School Women and Their Teachers at Mount Holyoke College, and for 24 years he was a teacher and then administrator in two Connecticut public school districts. From 1985 to 1995, he was a member of the Connecticut State Department of Education’s Bureau of Certification and Professional Development, where, among other responsibilities, he served as coordinator of the Connecticut Institute for Teaching and Learning and worked closely with school districts to develop and carry out professional development and teacher evaluation plans and programs. Hal developed and teaches for Western New England University a 3 credit MEd in Curriculum and Instruction online core course in Mentoring, Coaching, and professional development.
Portner writes, develops materials, trains mentors, facilitates the development of new teacher and peer-mentoring programs, and consults for school districts and other educational organizations and institutions. In addition to Mentoring New Teachers, he is the author of Training Mentors Is Not Enough: Everything Else Schools and Districts Need to Do (2001), Being Mentored: A Guide for Protégés (2002), Workshops that Really Work: The ABCs of Designing and Delivering Sensational Presentations (2005), and editor of Teacher Mentoring and Induction: The State of the Art and Beyond (2005) – all published by Corwin Press. He holds an MEd from the University of Michigan and a 6th-year Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study (CAGS) in education administration from the University of Connecticut. For three years, he was with the University of Massachusetts EdD Educational Leadership Program.
