William Glasser’s Choice Theory states that all human behavior is driven by the desire to satisfy five basic human needs:

• the need to be loved and accepted
• the need to be powerful
• the need to be free
• the need to have fun
• the need to survive

When I studied Glasser’s work early in my teaching career and later as a teacher trainer and teacher coach I connected strongly with the concept of creating a classroom environment where students felt safe and had a sense of belonging. By creating safety and belonging, I could anticipate student compliance. If I wanted to reach greater quality in student learning outcomes, I had to focus on generating an environment of power, freedom, and fun.

Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.

(William Glasser)

As I worked with several schools engaged in improvement plans for impacting student learning, I recognized that we needed to build the same elements of survival, belonging, power, freedom, and fun into teachers’ experiences. If you sign on to be a mentor for a new teacher, consider how your actions can address these elements to lead to an empowered teacher finding a quality environment for herself as well as her students.

Survival is a critical issue for the beginning teacher:

When do you have to show up to get something done on the copier?

How do you get a break for the bathroom?

What paperwork needs to be done by when in order to stay out of trouble?

Mentoring should extend from survival needs being met to building a sense of belonging for the new teacher within the school. How can your mentoring speed the process of the new teacher’s collaboration with staff across the school? Mentoring should assist the new teacher in finding power, freedom, and fun within the profession they’ve chosen.

Look for power, freedom, and fun by identifying where the beginning teacher finds his or her motivation to teach.

For most teachers, the motivation to teach isn’t found in the standards that students need to meet. Teachers have a passion for something that they want their students to gain from working with them. They have an outcome. They have an attitude. They have a belief system that they want their students to develop.

Often the job of the mentor is to assist the beginning teacher in understanding how they meet the standards and achieve the important issues that are motivating them as a teacher. The standards suggest to the public that it doesn’t matter what teacher your child gets because the standards are going to be met in every classroom. The standards are going to be met regardless of which of the two biology teachers you have.

The person dedicated to being a teacher knows that a student taking a class from me, spending a year with me, is going to leave with something special. I’m afraid the pressure that beginning teachers are often under from a curriculum standard, test-driven system can drive power, freedom, and fun away from the beginning teacher.

Mentors can begin by sharing their own personal passions and beliefs about teaching and how they manage to deal with meeting the standards while achieving those additional elements that generate a sense of power, freedom, and fun. These are often found in how they teach, or in the classroom environment they generate. I suggest that meeting the standards is in effect the cost of being a teacher. If I generate learning that has students master the standards, I have the opportunity to develop the passion, beliefs, and attitudes that drive me to be a teacher.

Mentors should model coachability.

It’s important for the beginning teacher to discover that making him or herself vulnerable to input from colleagues is a career-long path to great teaching. It’s critical that the beginning teacher not see the mentor as an evaluator, not see the mentor holding some measuring stick up in front of the teacher saying when you meet these criteria, mentoring will be over. You’ll be accepted into the profession.

Mentors might start by having the beginning teacher coach the mentor. Invite the beginning teacher into the mentor’s classroom to observe and provide feedback. Model for the mentee the way she can request coaching from the mentor. Another possibility is for the mentor to invite the mentee to be an observer as the mentor is coached by an instructional coach.

Years ago, I worked with a district that was trying to decide how long a mentor program should last. Should mentoring be a one-year program, an 18-month program, or a two-year program? I love the decision that they reached. They said that mentoring was over when the beginning teacher threw open the door of the classroom and said, “You can all come in.” They realized that at that point, the teacher was now a full-fledged professional. Getting all the ongoing collegial support that they should; taking ownership of their continued growth. The job of the mentor is to build the beginning teacher’s skill level and confidence level to the point that she is open to coaching: to develop coachability.

Mentoring can be (actually, should be) an opportunity for the mentor to gain increased power, freedom, and fun as well.

An instructional coach recently sent me a request which matched some conversations I have had with coaches working with alternative teacher entry programs. It struck me that it might also match for experienced teachers who are now finding themselves in virtual or hybrid teaching environments that seem not to match any of their previous teaching experience.

Her request:

I am stuck and need help if you can share some guidance. I have a first -year teacher who is a MAT candidate. That means is he has no formal teacher training and is making a career change. Presently in a master’s program, he has never had foundational education (this is how you teach) courses. He is very positive and super excited to be teaching!

He needs so much help with everything! I have no idea where to even start! Help! He literally needs a foundational start, but because he needs everything, I have no idea where to start! Help! Can you provide any guidance or suggestions?

As I read her note I recalled a question that I have used in coaching training sessions.

You have a new teacher who has no classroom management skills and no instructional strategies. Where would you begin?

After I have given them time for participants to discuss in small groups, I share my response: “Wherever he wants to.”

Why is this my approach?

#1 – I want to maximize the new teacher’s buy-in, commitment, and perseverance.

This is easiest to do on a goal that the teacher sets. I would ask the teacher to describe the change he would observe that would provide him the first indicator of his success and progress. He might say something like, “gaining some interest and desire to learn this content from the students.” I would then ask him what he would see and hear from the students when that interest and desire were present? With those descriptions, I can now create a partnership with the teacher to achieve the goal he has described. We can agree on what we are looking to make happen and will both know when signs of progress begin to appear.

This is a solution focused approach which I explored in an earlier blog.

Solution Focused Core Beliefs:

• • We don’t need to fully understand the problem before we can find a solution.
  • Everyone has the strengths and resources to help themselves.
  • There will already be something that is working.
  • Change can happen in very small steps.
  • No matter how bad the problem is, it doesn’t happen all the time.
  • We can’t change the past so we should focus on the future.

• Having a clear idea where you want to be makes it more likely that you’ll get there.

#2 – Management and instruction are strongly connected.

Therefore, regardless of the goal the teacher sets, you will be able to address both. Considering the teacher’s goal of student interest in content, you might discuss the role of novelty and curiosity in gaining attention. You might model an activity such as showing a film clip of a story the students are going to read and stopping at a climatic point. You could then have students individually write what they think happens next followed with a sharing of their ideas in small groups and then have them read the rest of the story. As you discuss the planning you did for the activity you can add your thinking about managing the engagement: seating arrangements, setting expectations at the start of the film, facilitating group work, etc.

As the teacher observes your modeling, you can have him look for times when you gained the student interest that he is seeking. He can analyze and discuss with you what he thinks you did that supported the desired student response. It’s valuable to share with the teacher what you observed while teaching and decisions you made “on the spot.” It’s important for the new teacher to understand that instruction and management practices while planned are also adjusted as the teacher observes students. This requires the teacher to have that “desired student response “in mind.

This should set the stage for the teacher to perhaps co-plan and co-teach a lesson with the coach. The planning for and debriefing of those experiences should present additional opportunities for sharing the connections between instruction and management. Ongoing coaching observations and conferences can continue to be built around the new teacher’s goals and pictures of success.

The new teacher’s experience in working in a coaching relationship where her goals and vision are driving the process should create coach-ability for her career.

Photos by Allison Shelley for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

Mentors should focus on empowering beginning teachers.

Years ago, I did a lot of work with William Glasser’s Control Theory/Choice Theory regarding motivating students. Glasser described a focus on survival, belonging, power, freedom, and fun. If you had a classroom where students’ survival needs were met (physical and emotional safety) and you created a sense of belonging, where the relationship pieces fit in, students would comply. They would meet minimum requirements. If you wanted to move students to doing quality work, you really needed to create an environment where students found power, freedom, and fun in the learning that they were being asked to do. I have always been a proponent of project-based learning, live event learning, and student voice and choice. These build power, freedom, and fun.

I suggest a similar focus for mentor programs for beginning teachers.

Survival is a critical issue for the beginning teacher:

• When do you have to show up to get something done on the copier?
• How do you get a break for the bathroom?
• What paperwork needs to be done by when in order to stay out of trouble?

Mentoring should move from survival needs being met to building a sense of belonging for the new teacher within the school. Then moving to the new teacher to finding power, freedom, and fun within the profession they’ve chosen.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.
– William Glasser

Look for power, freedom, and fun by identifying where the beginning teacher finds his or her motivation to teach.

For most teachers, the motivation to teach isn’t found in the standards that students need to meet. Teachers have a passion for something that they want their students to gain from working with them. They have an outcome. They have an attitude. They have a belief system that they want their students to develop.

Often the job of the mentor is to assist the beginning teacher in understanding how they meet the standards and achieve the important issues that are motivating them as a teacher. The standards suggest to the public that it doesn’t matter what teacher your child gets, because the standards are going to be met in any fourth-grade classroom. The standards are going to be met regardless of which of the two biology teachers you have.

The person dedicated to being a teacher knows that a student taking a class from me, spending a year with me, is going to leave with something special. I’m afraid the pressure that beginning teachers are often under from a curriculum standard, test-driven system can drive power, freedom, and fun away from the beginning teacher.

Mentors can begin by sharing their own personal passions and beliefs about teaching and how they manage to deal with meeting the standards while achieving those additional elements that generate a sense of power, freedom, and fun. These are often found in how they teach, or in the classroom environment they generate. I suggest that meeting the standards is in effect the cost of being a teacher. If I generate learning that has students master the standards, I have the opportunity to develop the passion, beliefs, and attitudes that drive me to be a teacher.

Mentors should model coachability.

It’s important for the beginning teacher to discover that making him or herself vulnerable to input from colleagues is a career-long path to great teaching. It’s critical that the beginning teacher not see the mentor as an evaluator, not see the mentor holding some measuring stick up in front of the teacher saying when you meet these criteria, mentoring will be over. You’ll be accepted into the profession.

Mentors might start by having the beginning teacher coach the mentor. Invite the beginning teacher into the mentor’s classroom to observe and provide feedback. Model for the mentee the way she can request coaching from the mentor.

Years ago, I worked with a district that was trying to decide how long a mentor program should last. Should mentoring be a one-year program, an 18-month program, a two-year program? I love the decision that they reached.They said that mentoring was over when the beginning teacher threw open the door of the classroom and said,”You can all come in.” They realized that at that point, the teacher was now a full-fledged professional. Getting all the ongoing collegial support that they should; taking ownership of their continued growth. The job of the mentor is to build the beginning teacher’s skill level and confidence level to the point that she is open to coaching: to develop coachability.