A mentoring program drills down on the Common Core

When California began the transition to the Common Core State Standards in 2012, the Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley New Teacher Project believed mentor teachers could play a significant role in helping schools integrate the Core into curricula and teacher practice.

At the Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley New Teacher Project, we have 75 mentors and 40 partner districts and charter schools willing to invest in this effort. In collaboration with our sister organization, the New Teacher Center, long recognized for its work to improve the effectiveness of new teachers by providing outstanding induction services and programs, we prioritized Common Core and put it at the center of our induction work with mentors and new teachers. Over the course of this three-year initiative, we reached 1,500 new teachers through their relationships with our mentors.

As we embarked on this work, several questions were clear: How could we accelerate mentor understanding of the Common Core? How could we transform the Common Core mandate into an opportunity to deepen our mentoring practice and ultimately transform teacher practice? How could we leverage the standards to ask new teachers deeper questions about meaningful, relevant instruction?