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Chapter 4. Invest in Growth Through Mentoring
In Chapter 3, you worked with your new teachers (and all of your teachers, if you hadn’t already!) to set meaningful goals for their growth—goals that actually stretch them, goals that they’re actually interested in meeting.
Now, your job is to invest in their professional growth and give them autonomy and support to meet the goals in their plan.
We do this through mentoring.
Most districts include mentoring as part of their induction program. This is standard practice for new teachers, and for good reason.
But if you’re thinking this is something you already have checked off your list, hold tight. Just as with onboarding, your mentoring program is worth taking another look at as an opportunity to provide support not just in your teachers’ first years, but throughout their career at your school. All teachers (and leaders) deserve high-quality mentoring from someone who takes a genuine interest in them and is there to help them grow and succeed.
What we’re talking about here is building a culture of mentoring, where teachers can pursue their goals for professional growth within the context of a caring community of support. As the leader, you can set the foundation for this community of support with the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development.Ⓡ
The ABCs of Powerful Professional DevelopmentⓇ
In my 2022 book Mastermind, I introduced a new framework designed to intentionally integrate Authenticity, Belonging, and Challenge into teachers’ and leaders’ learning experiences. Amazing things happen when staff members feel like they can show up as themselves, are connected to colleagues, and are challenged to grow. Together, these three elements provide a powerful foundation for transforming your school’s culture.
What’s more is that using the ABCs as principles to ground all of your professional development ensures that all staff in the school have a common language and common expectations for the quality and culture of their own learning environment.
Let’s explore each of the ABCs.
Authenticity
It’s important for your school to allow teachers to show up as themselves—to bring all of their unique strengths and passions to the table, and to be recognized for those valuable characteristics. This requires psychological safety, the first requirement for authenticity.
Remember Amy and Rick from the introduction? As nice as Rick was to his teachers, he hadn’t been intentional about creating a place where his teachers felt safe enough to be honest with him about their needs—which is why they came to me instead.
This is a common challenge for leaders, because you have to go above and beyond to invite the type of honesty that will transform your school. In the Ruckus Maker Mastermind™, there are several activities and norms we use to create psychological safety in our groups. I shared over a dozen ideas for cultivating psychological safety in my book Mastermind, but here are just a few of my favorites:
Meeting in small groups. Small groups make it easier for every voice to be heard, and make it harder for the shy folks to hide.
Co-creating group agreements. We set goals and deadlines together, rather than the “leader” handing down decisions and expectations.
Check-in questions. At the beginning of each interaction with a mastermind member, I ask them a set of questions to check in. It’s hard for people not to share what’s on their mind when they’re answering these questions!
In one sentence, what’s it like to be you right now?
1-10, how are you right now? (1 = low, 10 = high)
What made you smile this week?
What did you do that was scary this past week?
How did you take a risk this week? What did you learn?
The second requirement for authenticity is self-awareness. Most leaders aren’t really aware of the effect they have on others—just like Rick. To some extent, this is human nature, but it’s always something you can get better at. And yes, most of us have leadership reviews or 360s where our staff can give us some feedback, but how honest is your staff really in those assessments? And how seriously do you take the feedback? When you have an environment that is safe, you can invite honest feedback from your staff so that they trust you with their needs.
The third requirement for authenticity is being values-driven. Hopefully, your school has a list of sticky core values you’ve created (if not, read my book The Remarkable Vision Formula for advice!). These sticky core values create a set of boundaries that everyone in the school can operate fully within. They’re not restrictive; they’re actually freeing. Good boundaries allow everyone to carry out their ideas and plans with both autonomy and accountability.
Belonging
Everyone can grow in the right environment, an environment where they feel welcomed, where they don’t question their place or their role. That is what belonging is about.
There are three conditions for creating a culture of belonging:
Shared purpose
Inclusive environment
Trust
Every school has a mission or vision statement—usually one that is decided by committee and then handed down to the teachers and staff. Kind of defeats the purpose, don’t you think?
Instead, schools can create a sense of shared purpose by building new agreements every year (like we discussed earlier) and including all teachers in the process. But that’s just the start. Next, you have to live it out within an inclusive environment.
We already talked about changing your interview process to bring more diversity to your staff, like Lupita’s team has done in Arizona. But after being hired, the work of creating inclusive environments continues through deep listening, by showing empathy, and by centering others rather than yourself.
One of the biggest challenges to self-awareness that I see for leaders is centering others in their conversations. As the leader, we often feel like our authority means we need to have all the answers, and we should jump in with advice. Author Carol Radford pinpoints the problem—and the solution— succinctly:
“As a mentor, you will have lots of advice about survival and creating a community of learners. Your challenge will be holding back a bit and allowing the novice teacher to experience the process while you guide, question, and assist. Hold back. Become a listener.” (Radford, 2017, pg. 50)
By being aware of where you want to jump in and instead holding back and listening, your staff will feel more comfortable around you and like they can be themselves.
Finally, we have to build trust with our staff. Key to this is consistently demonstrating that we care by taking action to solve their problems. As I wrote in Mastermind, “Leaders who are able to drive results and respond quickly to problems build trust with their teams” (pg. 171).
Challenge
The truth is, none of us will grow if we stay comfortable. Comfort leads to complacency, and complacency leads to stagnation.
We all need to be challenged in order to grow.
And the beautiful thing is, once you have a culture where you can be yourself and where you are confident you belong, challenge shifts from something we dread and avoid to something we welcome, invite, and even seek out.
This is the whole idea behind the motto of our Ruckus Makers Mastermind™: “When you get better, everybody wins.” We mean it for leaders, but it’s true for every single staff person on our team. Everyone benefits when we challenge each other and ourselves to grow.
We do that first with honest communication. Remember Amy from the Introduction—it was only when she and her teammates decided to get honest with their leader, Rick, that he was invited to grow and become the leader they needed. Rick also had to be honest with them in return: honest about what was going on behind the scenes that they may not have been aware of, and what constraints he was operating under. Getting honest allowed all of them to work together to build a better system for communicating with parents.
The next piece of challenge is high-quality feedback. All teachers need feedback that is timely and aligned to the professional learning goals they set for themselves. If you’re using the Staff Success Scorecard, that should make delivering this feedback quick and effective.
I’m also a big fan of Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor. In that book, she makes the important point that feedback is a two-way street. Yes, bosses have to give their team feedback—but they also have to be willing to receive feedback, too.
“The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency.” (Scott, 2019, p. xi)
This is why allowing teachers to design their own pathways for professional learning and welcoming their ideas is crucial to ensure that everyone—especially you—benefit from the ABCs of Powerful Professional Learning.Ⓡ
The final component of challenge is a commitment to growth. It isn’t easy challenging others or being challenged, but if we’re all committed to growing as a team and community, we can all make progress towards our goals.
Reflection Questions
Be Innovative: How do you want to rethink your mentorship training program, so that all teachers have access to high-quality support?
Be Intentional: How will you integrate the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development into your mentoring process?
Be Proactive: Who is one teacher you can connect with in the next week to ask them how they’re doing and make sure they feel supported?
If this landed for you, here are a few ways to keep going.
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Continue Reading Part 5.
