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Autumn week 1

Mentor materials

Strand overview and contracting

Contracting meeting

Meet with your teacher and use the following prompts as the basis for a coaching contracting discussion. Contracting is most effective when both parties (yourself and the ECT) answer questions for each other.

  1. Professional prompts
    • What is important to you in your work?
    • What do you want to get out of this process?
    • What do you need from me to make this work well?
  2. Procedural prompts
    • What is the best way for us to communicate and when?
    • When are the best times to meet for our mentor sessions?
    • What classes/subjects are best to observe?
  3. Psychological prompts
    • What does an effective professional relationship look like for you? Can you give me an example?
    • What experience have you had of observation? How can we make observation an effective experience?
    • What experiences do you have of coaching? What might we need to do to embrace this coaching approach?

Context-specific meeting

In addition to contracting, as required, you may wish to meet with your teacher to work through any context-specific policies, systems and/or procedures that they will need to know about to be effective in their role. It is also important for teachers to be made aware of school-specific policies so you may wish to point your NQT to these and provide some time to discuss them.

Typical school policies include, but are not limited to:

  • Their responsibilities planning.
  • The school’s behaviour policy.
  • The safeguarding procedures.
  • How your school assesses pupils.
  • Your marking requirements.