January 23, 2005 - Not Sure
I've chosen to mentor my AR group. I'm trying to cultivate a CoP among the staff members in my division. These members are itinerant teachers who only have an opportunity to see each other once per month. This once per month is monopolized by a staff meeting. I'm hoping to use learning technology as the value and show them the benefits of connecting virtually. I could choose to mentor our tech support person, but I'm not sure that's such a great idea. She is very threatened by this new person, new position (me) and I think that might cause more problems and make the mentoring unsuccessful. I'm not quite sure how I'll go about this mentoring. I'm thinking that I could send out a weekly email to the participants that talks about opportunities available, stories, I'm not sure yet. I'll have to work on that. I hoping that as I get more into the book Cognitive Coaching, I'll have a better picture of what I want to do. For some reason, the Mentoring Toolkit just isn't doing it for me. I started the Tao book, and love that, but then realized that those assignments are later--I stopped for now. The Cognitive Coaching book intrigued me so much, I bought a number of other products from their website. Although I know I won't get a chance to peruse them until after OMET, I think they will prove valuable. I hope to find some time at FETC to read and reflect at night, I just need so time to think about it. Too much time has been spent on the AR these first two weeks. Having to have the Revision and the Data Analysis exercise completed before FETC really short-changed the other two courses. Hopefully that will come back into balance.
Note to self: random thoughts for mentoring:: suggestions for finding time to do things; suggestions for ways to communicate with the staff.