Today I attended a workshop about co-teaching and mentoring by Dr Dresden. Georgia is going to promote co-teaching in the future. This was a foundational workshop for mentor teachers, in which they could know about what is co-teaching, how it is different from traditional mentoring, what kinds of approaches can be used. This was the task of the morning session. In the afternoon mentoring session, teachers were divided into 3 groups to work out how to welcome your teacher candidates, stages of their concern, and scenarios playing and discussions.
I found it interesting to hear what the mentor teacher say. Although co-teaching sounds like a powerful idea to make the internships session more effective, there are still lots of barriers and problems to overcome and handle with. Mentors do need to know how to co-teach, why to co-teach, what to do, but this is not enough. Another important part is the collaboration and communication between each pieces. Well teacher candidates, university professors are in university system, while teacher mentors are in the middle school system, they have different responsibilities and roles, they have few chances to work together, they are all very busy and tend to draw back for lack of time or inconvinient reasons. You know what, it takes time and energy and wisdom to build trust relationships between them.
So in the afternoon session, communication skills are stressed. But I think it would be more helpful if supervisors and teacher candidates can show up and speak their voices. Well may be this will be done during the Pairs workshop.
