Neal Donahoe, Trellis Mentor:

Whenever I have a new mentee, one of the first things I have them do is to work on the listening, representing, and capitalizing on student ideas by running number talks once a week. These type of number talks allow for flexible mathematical concepts, but allow students to participate in a low stakes activity where there’s multiple right answers. It’s a really good opportunity for the mentee to record student work on the board, help students make connections between different ways of seeing the same problem, and also building on each other’s ideas when they see how somebody else has done it, and that might give students a new idea.

We often start with “which one doesn’t belong,” where mentees can really focus on how they can get the students to explain their representations. The students lead all the ideas. There’s no real big idea necessarily. It’s very low stakes, but the students can come to the board and write. They can try to explain in words. Every student’s work will always be with their color and their name on it so other students can refer back to it. And it gets them very early in their year as a teacher candidate to making sure that the students are the centered voice.

Lizzy Dutton, Trellis Scholar:

I would always try to connect what students were doing. So if someone at table one had a strategy and they’re presenting on it, I would ask someone from table two, who maybe had a similar strategy, what they thought about what was being presented.

Precious Listana, Trellis Scholar:

Every end of the quarter, I would always have an end of the quarter feedback form, and I made it so that it was general and also specific, where they could rate myself and rate our teacher assistants, and also give qualitative feedback on what worked well for them, what didn’t work so well. And I would always report back to them on the main findings from the survey so that they knew that, collectively, this is what people felt about my teaching style, felt about our TAs’ teaching style.

I also tell them, based on this feedback, “Here are the things that I want to continue. Here are the things that I want to do differently.” I think taking on those quarterly feedback, sharing with them the findings that I had, and being honest with them that, “Here’s what we’ll continue, here’s what we’re going to try differently, and there’s always open communication on what you think can be better. And I will do my best to take that and apply that to the classroom, if I agree with it.” I think with that a lot of students, I think with time, got more comfortable to do the feedback form, or to tell me through our exit tickets that this worked well, this didn’t work as well. I just use that to make the learning experience cater to the students that I was teaching.