Partners in Quality
Mentor Coaches
Mentor Coaches Inspire Teachers
Effective professional development is a complex process that requires change in deeply held beliefs. Teachers need opportunities to test and revise newly acquired knowledge in an environment where it is safe to take risks, make mistakes, reveal confusion, and seek new approaches.
Quality Assist has a long and proven history providing Mentor-Coaching and preparing Mentor-Coaches in child care, Head Start, Early Head Start, and family child care settings. Most recently we have provided mentor-coaching and comprehensive professional development programs for numerous federally-funded Early Reading First (ERF) programs.
As a collaborative partner with the prestigious, federally-funded Early Childhood Educator Professional Development (ECEPD) grant, we provide mentor-coaching and professional development to improve early language and literacy outcomes for young children. The ECEPD grant has afforded us the opportunity to inform approaches and national priorities for best practices in professional development for early childhood teachers.
Since 1995, Quality Assist has prepared more than 500 early childhood professionals who support their programs as a mentor-coach. The success of our mentor-coaches is evident as protégés have increased their professional credentials, programs achieved national accreditation, and children demonstrated measurable gains in language and literacy skills.
The Partners in Quality Mentor Course is a 50-hour course, typically offered in four 2-day sessions over a period of four months — or— two 4-day sessions over two months. Class sizes range from 15 to 20 participants to ensure that there is ample time for in-depth discussion and collaborative learning and to allow for new skills and approaches to be fully integrated into practical applications. Course content addresses each of the technical assistance roles and competencies. These topics are interconnected and become fully integrated over the eight sessions.
Effective Mentor Coaches...
- Create a safe, supportive environment that invites openness to ideas, intuitions, trial and error, and not knowing
- Clarify roles and expectations and supports the protégé’s ownership and responsibility for the “the work”
- Listen attentively with genuine interest to what the protégé is saying and not saying
- Engage in powerful questioning that shows understanding and empathy as well as challenge and provoke thought
- Create awareness by listening objectively and revealing patterns of thinking, behaviors, and reactions
- Introduce differences between protégé’s perception and alternative realities and possibilities
- Have extensive content knowledge and know when to provide direct instruction and when to engage the protégé in discovery
- Partner with the protégé to identify most appropriate actions
- Confirm commitment to action and honor readiness as well as lack of readiness to commit to action
- Respectfully hold self and protégé accountable for follow through; identifies underlying reasons for incompletion and re-confirms commitment
- Revise action plans as needed, provide supportive strategies, and hold space and energy of “success”
Join our network of mentor-coaches -- enroll in our Partners in Quality Mentor Course
Course Fee - $1,800
College Credit - The Partners in Quality Mentor Course is currently under review by the National Program on Non-collegiate Sponsored Instruction (National PONSI) for college credit eligibility.
For more information contact: Tracey Bankhead, 404-591-2564, tbankhead@qassist.com
