The Mentoring Year: A Step-By-Step Program for Professional Development

"The Mentoring Year is rich with experience and new ideas.  I endorse it without reservation."
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
President, Curriculum Designs, Inc.
Adjunct Associate Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

"This book contains explicit, step-by-step guidelines to build a program in the real world of schools. The authors demonstrate great empathy for teachers and administrators who confront the challenges facing public schools. They respect the demands placed upon contemporary educators."
Rick DuFour
Coauthor of Professional Learning Communities at Work

"The ′No Child Left Behind′ legislation requires strong teacher indoctrination. The Mentoring Year provides a comprehensive mentor program that gets down into the deep tissue areas. It lays out a grid to link standards to the workplace."
Marie Archibee, Supervisor, Professional Development
Department of Curriculum Instruction and Technology
Nassau BOCES, NY

"The authors′ organized step-by-step approach in creating an effective mentoring program has provided me the necessary tools to build a strong in-house mentoring program for all my staff."
Joe Novak, Principal
Mill Valley High School, Shawnee, KS

Use this as a rich and ready-to-go turnkey mentoring program or tailor it to building or district priorities!

Promote key characteristics of good mentors; support the needs of new teachers; generate reflection and collaboration. Along with strategies for these mentoring essentials, this program adds critical focus on student learning. Overflowing with rubrics for measuring growth towards best practice, checklists, tools and templates, this program provides every needed element for first-year induction. Further, it provides deep resources to support multi-year professional development and preparation for National Board Certification. Ready-to-go seminars for mentor/mentee communities focus on important themes including assessment, classroom management, instruction, goals, writing a professional development plan, standards, and curriculum. Agendas, timetables, activities, and clear responsibilities for all participants save time and support success. Grounded in The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards, this program works in any school, district, or state to build expert teachers and lift the level of professionalism throughout the learning community.

Resources and special features:

• Encourages a learning community, team building approach
• Includes complete plans and materials for mentor/mentee seminars
• Designed for flexible use either sequentially or around local priorities
• Depth and adaptability for use as preservice text, new teacher mentoring, and extended professional development.
• Mentee/Mentor, Administrator, and Coordinator Checklists

Mentor for success, student achievement and teacher retention with The Mentoring Year!

Susan Udelhofen is a national staff development leader providing consulting services to school districts, education agencies, universities, and colleges. Her work concentrates primarily on issues and practices related to curriculum mapping, teacher mentoring, assessment, standards, and program evaluation. Her experience includes work at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as a Goals 2000 consultant, and gifted and talented consultant. She has taught courses in teacher mentoring, assessment, reading methods, children’s literature, gifted and talented education, and also served as supervisor/instructor of preservice teachers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an experienced classroom teacher and holds current licensure.

She is the author of Keys to Curriculum Mapping (Corwin Press) and co-author of The Mentoring Year: A Step-by-Step Guide to Professional Development (Corwin Press) and The Teacher Journal: Reflections About Teaching and Learning (self-published). Her presentation experience includes appearances at the National Staff Development conference, Curriculum Mapping Institutes, New Teacher Center Symposium, American Educational Research Association, National Reading Association, National School Conference Institute, and Wisconsin Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Udelhofen earned a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction and an MS in Educational Psychology, both from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Kathy Larsen spent 18 years teaching middle school students and the last 10 years working exclusively in the field of professional development, concentrating efforts on community building and continuous growth cycles for individuals, teams, and systems. Currently she is a consultant for the Cooperative Education Service Agency #2 in Wisconsin, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and an associate member of Consensus Associates, Terrebonne, CO. She has presented at national and state conferences on mentoring, has published several articles in education journals, and serves on the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction task force to reform education licensing.