Every Great Achiever is Inspired by a Great Mentor
Our teachers integrate mentorship and social emotional learning into each student’s learning experience, in every single session. Instructional Coach Kathy Pahel dives into exactly HOW to masterfully weave these goals with academics in her Mentorship Training as the year kicks off.
If you asked teachers to rank a list of their favorite aspects of the work, I doubt Professional Development would be up there. In fact, I’ve been to a few happy hours where they lament the latest dry, irrelevant material that was thrust their way with a quiz at the end to make sure they didn’t doze off. But one of the perks of working with Pacific Preparatory, where the learning is highly customized for each student in a 1:1 setting, is that the same is true for our teachers’ professional development. Gone are the bureaucratic, compliance-focused marathon sessions, and in its place are engaging, important, and relevant topics with our Instructional Coach, Kathy Tojaga, at the helm. She’s a former teacher herself, so she gets it. Her latest masterful creation is all about how each teacher can become their student’s mentor. After all, they’re not tasked with holding 25 students’ attention and individual needs in mind at the same time. It’s just them and their student. This means they cannot waste the opportunity to connect with students on a personal level, and to be the role model every student wants their teacher to be. How does a teacher actually do that, though?
Kathy’s approach is designed to help integrate mentorship and social emotional learning into each student’s learning experience, in every single session. Teachers are providing academic support (of course), but also growing their students’ self-confidence and establishing a growth mindset. She walks teachers through a set of community building activities, interactive mini-lessons, and recommended physical materials organized by student age levels. At the end, Kathy offers many examples of ways to integrate the concepts into core academic courses in a practical way. The training is also highly collaborative, having solicited feedback and suggestions from PacPrep teachers who piloted the curriculum within our 1:1 model. Furthermore, collaboration is at the heart of a true mentoring relationship, because it’s how students feel truly seen. Kathy highlights that teachers are “thought partners” with their students, and “equals in exploring the learning journey together.”
In the spirit of collaboration, our teachers are consistently asked for their feedback in order to make the Professional Development experience one to celebrate at a happy hour, not to commiserate over. One teacher responded to her survey, "Thank you so much, Kathy, for putting these activities and resources together. They will be enormously helpful. I am inspired by your words and this training affirms our important role in mentoring our students and provides us with helpful tools to accomplish this.”
At PacPrep, we believe that successful teachers lead directly to successful students, and we are proud of the work we do to support teachers at every turn. Thanks to Kathy for this relevant and engaging new curriculum that contributes to this mission.