Week 2 Term 1 - Academic Mentoring - What does this look like for Totara House 2022? (February 8 - 11)

 MENTORSHIP: the guidance provided by a mentor, especially an experienced person in a company or educational institution.

I am a product of good, strong mentorship. Who I am and what I do professionally is not the result of my own doing but is the result of people who invested time and helped shape me into the person that I am today. Sounds incredibly corny but it is true. The guidance and direction that I have been under throughout my teaching career, has had a significant impact on the teacher that I am and for that, I am forever grateful. I believe that mentorship is an important - whether in an educational institution or not - this type of leadership is one that based on trust, understanding and knowing who you are working with and having a vision or action plan for your client. 

A snapshot from one of many assemblies with my Year 9 cohort 2017. 

I understand the importance of mentorship and the value that it can have on both the mentor and mentee. As a Whanau Dean, I see my role as both pastoral and academic mentor to my students. The role is needed but it is also a demanding in terms of time and I know that all teachers (whether in leadership roles or not) are time poor. Totara House have three Academic mentors and we are going to start our action plan for our students and more importantly get to an understanding on what we are doing and who we are working with. 

We are still in the planning stages on WHAT this will look like for our Whanau House - but we are eager to get it going. We know that we have to get on the same page and agree on the best approach for our Whanau House. Establishing who is in the team and the classes assigned to them is the first step. 

Totara House Academic Mentorship Team 2022

So in preparing for this I shared an excerpt from Onehunga High School who have an established Academic Mentoring system in place that runs alongside the Pastoral Mentoring system. 

Click the image to access OHS school website to see what this looks like. 

Setting the tone and making sure that this starts well is imperative. An idea on what we can do to start, is that we need to discuss this as a team and agree on what our approach should be for Term 1. An idea that I have suggested is: 

Know the Learner (Term 1 focus)

It is important we KNOW who our learners are. What are their needs and how can we support them. That requires some meaningful and structured conversations, time and planning with our akonga. This may take an entire term to establish and that is OK, I would rather the team take the time NOW to build the relationship with their priority students and get to know what they want from this relationship. A suggested outline on what this looks like has been suggested and I look forward to hearing feedback from the mentorship team on what they think is the best fit for our focus 'Know the Learner'. 

Suggested plan on what we can do start the Academic mentor journey with our akonga - a work in progress :D

As with every project or class that I am working with, I look forward to documenting the journey. Throwing around ideas and formulating a plan is fun but I really want to get into it as soon as we can. What we have established so far is WHO is doing what and we have already collated data of our current students who short of achieving NCEA Level 1 + Level 2 in 2021. We have this data already as we were quite data driven with our senior students last year and this has flowed onto this year. I look forward to recording our progress or lack of progress - it is always good to review, reflect and reevaluate.