**Region 10 & Alaska Native
T/TA**![](media/image1.png){width="2.03125in" height="0.34375in"}

**Conference Call**

**February 15, 2006**

**Moderator: Christy Cox**

Christy Cox: Great. Well welcome everybody. This is Christy Cox, the
Early Learning and Literacy Content Specialist with Region 10 training
and technical assistance office. Here in this office we support the
administration for children and families serving Region 10, Idaho,
Alaska, Oregon and Washington, Head Start and Early Head Start grantees
as well as the Alaska native programs with Region 11 or the American
Indian Alaska Native program branch.

I'd like to welcome everyone and do two quick reminders. If your phone
isn't already on mute, if you could please mute and pressing star 6 is
one way to mute it if your phone does not have a mute option already on
it. The other comment I would like to make is that if you are
uncomfortable asking questions or participating in the phone call that's
absolutely okay. I participate in conference calls and I'm very hesitant
to ask my questions and usually end up calling the person back after the
phone call and that is definitely...

Christy Cox: You can e-mail (Renee Andrae) any questions or comments
that you have throughout this presentation so please feel free to do so
and also please feel free to jot those comments down for later
reflection or later conversations. I'm very open to that and would hope
that you would contact me if you had more, wanted more information.

Okay. We're going to get started. I'm looking at the agenda today. I
hope that you have had a chance to download a copy or have a copy of
Steps to Success: Decisionmakers Guide there with you. It would be most
helpful and if you don't have it there in front of you maybe you can do
some scurrying and try to get one. We will be going mostly over that
Steps to Success: Decisionmakers Guide and what will happen before we go
through the guide is to actually talk a little bit about what Steps to
Success is so that you know what you're making decisions about.

So I'd just like to overview the structural design of the Steps to
Success curriculum. This is the curriculum that the Head Start bureau
has created. The Steps to Success curriculum is all about trying to
support management and mentor coaching efforts at the Head Start and
Early Head Start level. It's, this is the Steps to Success instructional
tool is really designed to help focus around the skills of mentor
coaching, the skills of coaching are a lot like reflective practice
which you may already be doing in your program to some degree or other.

The other part of Steps to Success is that it has an early literacy
content focus. And I believe that these two strands, the skills of
mentor coaching strands and the skills about content area language and
literacy are quite distinct and can be pulled apart depending on the
needs of your program. So keep that in mind as we're talking about this
and going through the decisionmakers guide and also as I talk through
the Steps to Success curriculum. It's built into four units. The first
unit is called Building Relationships to Promote Child Literacy Outcomes
and it overviews mentor coaching skills like establishing trust and
communication, clarifying roles and expectations between mentors and
protégées or mentors and mentees.

If you're program doesn't already have a mentoring system it may be a
chance for you to think about that at this time. What roles might a
mentor have that would be similar or different than a supervisor? Also
that first unit talks a lot about cultural sensitivity, also about adult
learning theory and different learning styles. So as I said earlier in
these Steps to Success curriculum materials the Head Start Bureau has
built in a content specific area around literacy. So while these
materials are trying to help programs to train and create and support
mentors by lots of, in lots of different ways so that their skills can
be used in the program with new teachers or new home visitors or what
have you, there's also a literacy content.

For example, book knowledge and appreciation, print awareness and
concepts of print are covered in that first unit. The second unit of
Steps to Success is titled Observation and Analysis. The mentor coaching
skills strand talks about conducting objective observations, examining
classroom observation tools that you might already use. What are you
using when you go, when a supervisor or a mentor goes into a classroom?
Is that observation tool simply a running record of everything that
happens in the room? Is it specific? Is the observation goal set by the
supervisor the mentor? Or is the observation goal set by the person
being observed?

So this second unit focuses a lot and almost intensively on observation
and doing intentional observation with staff between mentors and
protégées. The literacy component of unit 2 is early writing and
alphabet knowledge. Unit 3 is about reflective practice and it builds
onto the ideas covered in Unit 2 about doing objective observations. But
once those observations are done how is the information communicated to
the protégée or the person being observed?

So the mentor coaching skills in Unit 3 are very much about planning
thoughtful, reflective conferences, getting together with that person
that was observed and helping them and guiding them through the process
of reflecting on their own practice. It also focuses on using journals
or dialog journals as well. The literacy content area for Unit 3 is all
about oral language development.

Unit 4 is focused around using child assessment data and if you were on
last month's phone call with Gene Gousie this unit coincides very
directly with what that conversation was focusing around the interplay
between screening, assessment, curriculum planning and looking again at
child outcomes. Unit 4 does an excellent job of focusing at using data
about your students and about your children to inform instruction and
planning. Unit 4 goes step by step through a process helping mentors to
become experts at using assessment information to plan instruction so
that those mentors can go ahead and help their protégées do the same
thing.

And on the literacy content strand of Unit 4 they focused on
phonological awareness. So there's an overview on the Steps to Success
curriculum in the four units. There was also a Protégée Journal and
there is also this Decision Makers Guide which we are looking at today.
You will actually, you meaning all grantees in all of the regions around
the United States, will be receiving this curriculum in the springtime.

And in these packets you will be receiving four facilitators guides and
then there are four for mentors, the people that would actually be
mentoring other staff.

There are four protégée journals, two Decision makers Guides, and two
Professional Development Plans and these two I think are the keys to the
excellence of this curriculum: four DVDs and four VHS for tutored video
instruction. And having actually gone through them \[the videos\] a
number of times myself each time I've gone through them I'm feeling more
and more confident about the content and the intentionality of the
creators. The people that have built this Steps to Success mentor
coaching curriculum and instruction guide have done a really thoughtful
job of putting together the elements of reflective practice, trust and
relationship building, using assessment strategies and they've done this
in such a way that they're showing plenty of examples around Early Head
Start, again this is birth to five, a zero to five. They've really done
a careful job of putting together the materials in a way that's most
helpful, most open-ended, most practical for programs.

So they've tried to design something that is going to be flexible and
pertain to individual program needs. Along with the physical print
materials and the tutored video instruction DVDs and VHSs there are also
online materials that you can access. On the agenda I did put the URL as
www.steps-net.org. And on that website there are all kinds of resources
and materials. I highly recommend that you gift yourself 15 or 20
minutes to go there and click around on all the buttons just to see
what's there.

I definitely believe in that hands on approach and I think giving
yourself the time to play around and see what's available there may be
worth your while to see, get a better picture of what is online, the
resources available to you there as well as what some other programs
might be doing. I also want to highlight, I have two people I think on
the call (Sherry) and (Kim) from Idaho who I think have been using the
online discussion board. They've been posting comments and questions as
they had gone through a pilot study of the Steps to Success curriculum.
So they were a piloting group. So if you want to step on there you can
look at the discussion that's going on between myself, (Ruai Gregory) in
Idaho and then many of the participants from the Idaho pilot group. So
I'd just like to applaud them and give them some mention because they've
been using a lot of time and energy to study this area.

I had built in some pause and reflection time. I would like to give you
a minute to write down questions, think about what I've shared with you,
look or ask yourself if you need some clarification if something didn't
make sense. So please take this full minute, give yourself the
opportunity to think back on what you heard and write down any questions
or thoughts that you have that pertain to your own programs, your own
staff.

So we're going to move onto, we're going to do kind of a walk through of
the Decision Makers Guide. So if you have that in front of you go ahead
and pull it out. If you have it in front of you on screen go ahead and
pull it up. You might want some sticky notes, just a pad of paper,
whatever works for you. I usually work with my highlighter and multiple
sizes of sticky notes to help me get through something like this because
I know that there are areas that I want to come back to. So I'm going to
start just on page 1 at the preface.

So the first paragraph just kind of lays it out for you that the intent
of this Steps to Success: Decision Makers Guide is for Head Start
leaders, managers, policymakers. It's trying to help you build a system
that's going to provide your staff with the resources and support that
they would need to succeed. If the mentoring is something that you're
already using then this is a way for you to reflect on how it's going.

And if you don't have a formal mentoring process already built into your
structure or into your program this guide is to help you think about how
that might work. So building a mentor coaching system can really help
you focus on some professional development especially in an
individualized way, in a way that helps staff develop from wherever
they're at and then move forward and grow in that way increasing or
improving outcomes for our students and families.

I think something that should definitely be said is that while these
Steps to Success curriculum tools were built and do have some structure
there's no, and it says here at the end of this page 1 that there isn't
a one size fits all approach and as with all Head Starts we all have our
own individual needs and strengths and opportunities and challenges that
we carry with us and have around us. And I think that in any case this
is a chance for you to think about those individual needs and how
mentoring might help you to either strengthen existing strengths or to
strengthen weaknesses in your program.

If you go to page 2 please, I'd just like to highlight again that there
is some information there about Steps to Success. It explains that it's
an early literacy and mentor coaching system or design and all it is, is
it's meant to support ongoing mentor coaching initiatives that you may
have or that you may want to have in your program. A colleague of mine
really felt strongly to make this distinction, a strong distinction
between the skills of mentor coaching that are highlighted and then the
literacy piece. If literacy is something that you don't feel is that
it's something you need to focus on but you would like to have, offer
more mentoring in your programs, please pick that part out for yourself
and focus on that part that you need.

There's a number of different reasons that mentor coaching system (on
page 2) why you might develop a mentor coaching system in your program,
those are questions and thoughts to consider for yourself but there is a
really lovely quote that I'd like to read from a mentor coach in a Head
Start program. She said "Our mentor coaching system is an investment in
our staff; our teachers now see themselves as real professionals.
They're proud of their work and as a result our retention rates have
improved significantly"

So even in that just short statement you hear things about retention
rates improving, you hear about teachers viewing themselves more
professionally, you see that that is an investment, the time and energy
spent on mentor coaching it has the payoff down the line with staff,
with children and with family.

On page 3 it lets you know what's going to happen throughout the guide.
It talks about how you might select a model for mentor coaching in your
program. It talks about finding financial resources and I would also say
not necessarily only financial but resources in general that means
personnel, time and energy, materials, it talks on number three about
selecting mentor coaches. How do you pick the mentor coaches for your
program?

Part four looks at orienting and training mentor coaches. And part five
focuses a little bit on linking the early literacy mentor coaches to
what's already happening in your program systems. So turn to page 4. And
asking yourself the question "If I was going to have a mentor coaching
model in my program, what would it look like?" And if you already have a
mentoring program you would ask yourself, "How well the mentor program
is structured in my program and is that structure working?" Is that
model doing what we had hoped it would do?"

This page 4 lays out a few of the different considerations when you're
choosing a model. It asks you to think about your own program
philosophy. It asks you to think about the capacity, organizational
capacity, how large is your facility? How many staff people do you have
that could be mentors? How many potential protégées or incoming staff do
you have that might need mentoring?

What kind of financial and/or personnel resources already exist or would
need to be found? This guide, if you go to page 5, it selects three
mentor coaching models that are most prevalent around the United States.
However, I would really like to take the time here to recommend that
these are three and by any means, phase 3 could be integrated or become
hybrids of something that may already have. The first suggestions that
they have of the three commonly used models of mentor coaching is,
starting on page 5, is that the supervisors are mentor coaches.

And this model you may, their supervisors are already in programs and so
in this way you don't have to find new people. However, this may add new
roles and responsibilities onto existing supervisors. I'd also like to
take a minute and share with you, I'm pulling this information out of
*Putting the Pro in Protégée*. I'll refer to it throughout the rest of
the presentation. There is a guide here, a small chart that delineates
the supervising role versus a mentor's role and I would just like to
read through a few of those for you.

A supervisor's role may be to rate employees' behavior and evaluate
overall job performance so we're talking about evaluation. Mentors on
the other hand may act as confidantes that work with protégées to
improve their job performance and they do this by developing close and
intimate relationships with that person. These two things sound very
different. And here's another contrast. Supervisors often observe
employees in relationship standards. Whereas a mentor may go in to
observe a protégée or a mentee on a more personal or individualized
level, that the protégée may have chosen a goal and that mentor is
helping them meet that goal.

So those are two very different types of observations or reasons for
observation. One, a supervisory role and one a mentorship role. So I'd
like to point that out when you start thinking about the possibility of
using supervisors and mentor coaches and that you give sufficient
thought to the idea that those supervisors will have to switch hats. And
that they would want their staff to know that they were maybe wearing.

Another commonly used model is the mentor coach as mentor only. And this
maybe where you choose someone in your staff and they take on the full
role of mentor and they mentor a number of different people or that you
hire someone outside of your organization to come in and help you with
that role.

It suggests that when you're adding this extra layer of staff and this
is the part that I'd like to emphasize throughout that it needs to be
carefully defined, the roles and responsibilities of the mentor coach
and the supervisor if you have mentor coaches that are, that's all their
duty is then to be clear with everyone involved what the roles of that
person are versus the supervisor or versus the manager. So if you're
considering that idea that you would prefer to have supervisors remain
supervisors and mentor coaches be something separate that those roles be
really clearly delineated.

The third model that most Head Start often uses is this peer teachers as
mentor coaches. And myself coming from a background of the National
Writing Project and this motto of "teachers teaching teachers" I
appreciate this model. It's one where you may have a more advanced or
more experienced teacher in the role of mentor. And this happens a lot
informally. And again speaking with some colleagues someone made the
comment that we ask our staff to show new people the ropes all the time.

We may even be asked "can you mentor this person, this new person that's
new in your staff?" And I think we do that without giving the chance and
opportunity for those people that we requested to be mentors to reflect
on what mentoring is and to receive training on being a mentor. If you
ask somebody to "show them the ropes" or "take them under their wing,"
that may mean showing them where the bathroom is, helping them to use
the protocol guide or to show where the nearest emergency pamphlet is.

So when we say "take them under your wing" or "be a mentor" or "show
them the ropes" I think that we are assuming a lot about what we may be
asking our staff people. And so these peer teachers, and this applies to
all of the areas that we're talking about that the intentionality and
the time and the energy that you are all spending right now on the phone
thinking about this will help down the line if you do end up making
changes to what you are already doing or adding a new layer of mentoring
into your program.

So this intentionality being very careful and supporting this kind of
program I think is a key step in making it successful. That by asking
somebody to be a mentor that it's clear what your asking, that your
dreams for that mentoring program had been well established.

> I'd like to go onto page 7, this Finding Financial Resources of Early
> Literacy Mentor Coaching. I'm jut going to highlight a few of the
> resources that are mentioned here. And I'd also like to read through
> the quote that's listed there.

It says "our mentor coaching system is an investment in our staff. Our
teachers now see themselves as real professionals. They're proud of
their work and as a result our retention rate has improved
significantly." This is the quote that I read earlier and I think that
that idea about investment in our staff is definitely something to keep
in mind when you're talking about funding or financial resources.

In the paragraph of pursuit, where it says pursuit there is a website
that's listed in the childcare information center. It's there in the
middle of the paragraph. I want to make sure that you are able to see
that and that the place to start looking, if you're looking for
additional funding or resources to fund a mentor coaching initiative in
your program. It goes through some coaching of be persistent, keep
looking. If you don't find what you're looking for initially in funding
resources keep looking. I'm on page 8 now where it says partnerships and
I would like to highlight this area.

In Idaho, I was working with three different grantees when we did the
piloting of the Steps to Success curriculum and the idea of those three
areas working together, those three grantees working together made it
very possible for the training to happen. Think about what partners you
might have near you that you could work together with in terms of
developing a successful mentoring program or revisiting your current
mentoring program and expanding it or improving it.

Under the local and/or state foundations, still on page 8, I'd like to
highlight another website that you might go through for more
information. Again, under that local and/or state foundations it says
filings to many regional associations of grant makers at and then
there's an FD&C Century dot org.

We also suggest, on page nine, that you look to some local sources. None
of this is new to you so I'm going to jump through this. I wanted to
make sure that you had a chance to see those websites however. So we're
moving onto page 10, this is in selecting and matching mentor coaches.
And this is a chance for you to really think about what would a mentor
coach do in your program or in the program that I work with? And you're
thinking about what are the characteristics of a mentor coach?

You want them to have professional knowledge and skills and in that
sense you want them to have a deep understanding of teaching, teaching
theory and also about if you have a content area specific like literacy
that they know a lot about oral language, about reading, writing, about
the merging stages of those areas. A mentor though however they may be
excellent in the classroom, they may be a master teacher of zero to
three, however that master teacher may not necessarily make the best
mentor coach because they also need to have the skills to apply your
knowledge with adult learners.

And I think that is what these Steps to Success materials offer training
guides to support these people that I'm asking to be mentors. They help
answer "How can I give them the skills that they may lack or that they
may need to develop because they already know what they're doing in the
classroom?" I want them to help share and develop those strengths in
other people and so this functional skill, this idea of working with
adult learners and with people in the program is what Steps to Success
is best at.

So again I go back to that idea of when we ask our staff "hey, you know
what, can you take the new hire under your wing?" What does that mean?
How is that person going to take the person under their wing and what
are they going to do for that person?

So by being intentional and thoughtful about those skills it may help
both parties involved, both the mentor and the mentee. And finally one
of the other major areas that you want to think about when you're
selecting mentors for your program, there's a nice quote on page 11. It
comes from a piece of research and it says "in selecting a mentor
candidate you should consider two issues only. Capability, what the
person can do and personality. And of these two personality is by far
the most important.

Over 87% of all people failed not because of capability but because of
personality." So you want to carefully think about who would make good
mentors in your program and then help them build up their capabilities,
their mentor coaching skills or their language or literacy content area
knowledge if that's something that is a weakness.

I would like to return your focus on page 11 it talks about the
selection process, how you pick mentors. The *Putting the Pro in
Protégée* well it maybe something that's on your shelf and you haven't
taken a look at it. The more time I spend with it the more I realize
that it's a fantastic resource because it highlights real programs, real
mentorship and protégée relationships, real struggles and real
applications of what we're talking about today.

There's an excellent matrix at the end of the *Pro in Protégée* that
highlights the organizational structure of mentoring programs. For
example, in Pennsylvania they talk about how the mentors and the
protégées are chosen, who they are in the program.

For example, some protégées are new teachers, some protégées simply move
from one position to another. Some protégées or mentors have to apply so
you have to be very invested in the protégée experience and also the
mentor as well in some cases. In other cases it's mandatory that all new
staff will absolutely go through a protégée and mentorship relationship.
So if you're curious about how other people and other agencies are using
mentoring I would steer you right to the *Pro in Protégée* which is a
free document through the Head Start Bureau.

If you turn to page 14 I think that this does a nice job at showing what
some of the specific concrete activities that you might ask a mentor to
do in your program. This is a sample job description that the Head Start
Bureau has put in for your review. It' s a way for you to think about
who these people might be, what qualifications you might want of them in
the ideal world so that you can start thinking about how to create or
develop or support a system with qualified staff .

The specific activities one through six - when you say "take me under
your wing" or "show them the ropes," this is what this means. So it does
a nice job of making that vague statement more actionable, something
that you can act upon.

We've gone through three areas in this mentor coaching Steps to Success
guide and I would like you to have a chance to write down questions in
selecting a model, questions about resources, and comments about
selecting mentor coaches for your program. Those are the three areas
that we've covered and I'd like to give you a minute to think about that
and ask questions of yourselves and your programs. So we'll take a
moment to let you do that.

Okay, I hope you had a chance to write down some thoughts or some
reflections for yourself. I have to take a comment or sidestep for a
moment and just speak about myself personally, having spent the majority
of my time in the classroom being a very firm constructivist and
believing that I've already had a lot of time to be spending with these
materials in terms of the steps to success curriculum, even this guide,
decisionmakers guide have been through many times and have been building
my own understanding of its content and so I just wanted to make sure
that you are having the opportunity to build your own understanding and
make it useful for you. So I hope that the brief pauses while quiet and
silent that they're a chance for you to think about what we're thinking
about and do it in a quiet way without somebody talking at you.

We're going to go and take a look on page 16; I just wanted to highlight
some of the areas of orienting and training mentor coaches. Again this
goes back to this very critical key idea that while you may be asking
staff to mentor or act as mentors the question is are you giving them
enough support and enough training to do that job well and to help them
succeed?

Have you had a chance or have you made the goals and expectations of the
mentoring program explicit? Meaning have you written them down? Have you
had conversations with people that will be involved and stakeholders
that will be playing different roles in the program? Have you had a
chance to look through the *Pro in Protégée* book and look at how other
programs are doing it so that you can get as many different ideas from
as many different sources as you have time and energy for?

Another area is this emphasis on the content focus on the Steps to
Success. And then the idea that different teachers have different levels
of content area knowledge and so if you're wanting an early literacy
focus for mentor coaching in your program, that that would be something
to really consider is "which of my mentors have that kind of content
area background knowledge?" And if they have that content background
knowledge are they also good mentors? But if they're good mentors but
they don't have the content knowledge how am I going to help them
achieve that? How am I going to help them gain that knowledge so that
they can pass it on to protégées and to the people that they're working
with?

This is all about the Steps to Success curriculum that's going to be at
your doorstep in the early springtime so you're ending up with a bunch
of different new materials that focus around the skill building of
mentorship and early literacy.

On page 17 it talks about addressing the needs of the mentors that you
have hired or that you have chosen or that have applied and in the Steps
to Success there is a lot of self assessment and there's a lot of asking
mentors to look at their own practice not only as literacy content
people but even more so as mentor coaches. It's asking them to think
about their own development as professionals and to help them grow in
those areas that they identify themselves.

Your mentors that mentors need just as much support, we all need mentors
in different areas. We're all closer to expert in some areas and closer
to beginners in other areas of our life and those mentors need resources
and ongoing support in the same way that you would expect them to work
with their protégées or mentees. So in considering some type of
mentorship program or your current mentorship program the question is
"am I giving enough resource and support to those mentors and if I'm not
what do I need to do to help them?"

One way that you might do that is by establishing a mentor library and
that would be looking at videos that you probably already have laying
around your areas. Maybe they've kind of been distributed and they've
been lost track of. You probably have for example, Putting the Pro in
Protégée but the question is where is it? You might have the leader's
guide to the outcomes - where is that? You might have the Circle
training or the STEP training guide somewhere but where is it? And just
maybe putting a place or a section of your office together that really
focuses on those mentoring skills or that works on professional
development or the reflective practice process. And making a place where
mentors or persons that act like mentors in your program can go for help
and for support when there's no one, nobody physically available to help
them they've got some written or video available.

In that Establish a Mentor Library section on page 17 they also
highlight again the website, the www.steps-net.org. And I would just
recommend giving yourself a chance to just go click around and see
what's there. On pages 18 and 19 this lays out some of the exact same
things that we are talking about, about helping to formalize a
relationship, helping to formalize a mentoring and protégée expectations
and roles so that it's not a 'show them the ropes' kind of mentoring
it's a 'I'm here to support you in these specific goals and areas and
this is how we can do it.' This is a sample agreement that a mentor
coach and a protégée might use together so that everybody is on the same
page and everybody understands what's expected of the situation of the
relationship.

The last section that I'd just like to highlight briefly is on page 20
it's section 5 and it's about integrating this mentor coaching into
existing management systems. Think about your record keeping and
reporting systems. What are those like already? Do you have mentors that
are keeping track of their visits with protégées? If not then this gives
you a chance to think about how that would work.

What kind of ongoing monitoring would need to happen so that the
collection of data, this is page 22, so the collection of data is
ongoing and that spot checks are being made and that mentor coaching
program is being supported and supervised? On page 23 it highlights the
self assessment process. And self assessment to me just really ties into
the whole push towards making decisions using data. Data-based decision
making. So what have we collected? What do we know about our mentoring
programs so that we can either continue what we're doing because it's
really working or make some changes?

I'd like to highlight for you a great bank of self assessment questions
on page 23. It starts just about 3/4 of the way down the page and it
says as your team collects, processes information they may want to find
out if the project is operating as planned. They may ask questions such
as "were the mentor coaches hired? What type of training did they
receive, etc.?" I wanted to highlight that area for you that maybe
something to use especially for existing mentor programs. You could ask
yourself and your staff those questions to help you assess how well it's
going.

And then just as we finish up, page 24, helps you also think a little
bit about things you might look at if you're doing assessments and then
again planning using that data you've collected to be planful and
mindful of future efforts towards mentoring.

We've gone through this giant overview of something that could be very
monumental, it could also be very grass roots starting with just one
teacher and one protégée but the idea I think here is that you're
looking at individualizing staff development and that this mentoring is
a possibility for that to happen. The Steps to Success curriculum will
be yours to use as you will, a tool to help you succeed in
individualizing professional development for people in your program.

Pages 26 and 27, may be a great way of overviewing the Decision Makers
Guide with people who were not on this phone call because it outlines
each of the areas that we talked about however briefly so that they can
see kind of a full picture in terms of planning.

If you slip through the last few pages, these are just samples for
interaction records, recordkeeping, a way for you to track what's
happening for mentors or protégées in the program or in future efforts
towards mentoring. So I'm going to give you a minute for you to think
about those last two sections. One was specifically about training, how
you might train mentors and offer them support and resources and the
last was about linking this mentor coaching effort into your management
system.

So we'll take a minute for you to think about how that might work or how
that already works and might work better. And then we have about 10
minutes for questions and comments. So I'll leave a minute of silence
and then we can start with questions you might have.

I would love questions or comments that people have. What were you
thinking? What did you notice as we went through the decisionmakers
guide?

Woman: Yeah. I have a question. This is (Liz) in Boise, Idaho.

Christy Cox: Hi Liz.

Woman: Hey is there going to be a regional training scheduled besides
the pilot program you did in Eastern Idaho?

Christy Cox: Yes there are definitely possibilities, there is a roll out
letter that is being crafted as we speak, has been rolling around about
trying to figure out how best to individualize this kind of training so
that the most people can get the most benefit from it. So yes there is a
number of different models for getting training. I don't know if that
answered your question specifically enough.

Woman: I wanted to know specifically if you had chosen dates for when
you were going to be providing training on the curriculum itself.

Christy Cox: No. Specific dates have not been planned; however this is a
good chance to think about what would work well for you because I am
very open to participating in cluster meetings and/or trainings with
your program itself. Based on my experience with the pilot program this
is a pretty in depth curriculum. We spent four full days going through
it and that was fairly rushed. However, I believe that it was also
sufficient.

So that's something to kind of consider and think about if you wanted to
train some trainers in you program that's definitely something that
could happen if there are some people that you feel like would be really
willing to go through this either with myself or with one of the TA
specialists in your state. They can also go through it individually
without some kind of outside TA support because the materials are very
guided and very systematic so that's also a possibility. So dates have
not been set however we can set some if you want to give me a call
(Liz).

Woman: Christy how do we get a hold of you specifically if we needed or
felt we needed on site training or local training or maybe a group of
us?

Christy Cox: I can be reached at 206-615-2704 and I will also give you
my e-mail. It's in all lower case. ccox@acf.hhs.gov.

Christy Cox: The T/TA ACF website also has our contact information.
Okay? So that's another place where you can find my name and you can
also see my picture which is not the most flattering image but not the
worst either. So thank you (Cheryl Lynn). I appreciate that question.

Is anybody out there already using a mentor model?

(Melissa Hernandez): This is (Melissa Hernandez) from the Riverhead Head
Start and I'm actually the mentor coach here for our program. And I
think it's a wonderful program. I love my job. I think the way we've got
it set up is really neat. We've got great communication between me and -
well earlier we were talking about that really distinct line between a
supervisor and a mentor coach when you do have a mentor coach. And it's
interesting because as a mentor you have to go in and mentor them and
sometimes that supervisor feels like they're the bad person because they
have to go in and request a change and then the mentor coach comes in
and is the one that helps get to make that change.

So there is really that distinct line between a supervisor and a mentor
coach. Does that make sense?

Christy Cox: That makes perfect sense. I appreciate you kind of
highlighting that again but those are two different roles

(Melissa Hernandez): They are and what I love about how we've set up our
program is every Thursday we meet with the coordinator, the center based
specialist which is the supervisors and myself and the disability person
and we just talk about each classroom and see where we can mentor
whether it's specific things that a teach needs or if it's a new
employee or there's a specific (unintelligible) that needs help. So I
love that as a team we come together and really figure out as a whole
how that mentor coach can really provide support. So I hope that helps.

Christy Cox: Thank you. Would you be willing to be contacted if people
wanted to talk to you more about that?

(Melissa Hernandez): Absolutely. My number here, actually let me get,
we've got a toll free number here so it's 1-866-753-0951 and my
extension is 112.

Woman: Christy this is (Carolyn) in Southern Oregon.

Woman: I'm wondering if you can outline for me the differences between
this new curriculum and the one that we've had in the past *Putting the
Pro in Protégée*.

Christy Cox: I think that this curriculum - thanks that's a great
question - this *Putting the Pro in Protégée* I think is an expanded
version of the decisionmakers guide. So this *Putting the Pro in
Protégée* highlights some of the areas that you would need to think
about if you had a mentoring system or a mentoring program. I believe
that the difference is that *Steps to Success* is an actual curriculum
or a training that you would go through with mentors and/or protégées
especially specifically looking at how does someone acquire or how do I
help someone acquire mentoring skills or reflected practice skills?

Woman: This is (Cheryl Lynn) in Southern Oregon. I also just have kind
of a, just kind of looking at it from the staffing angle. So if you were
to have it formalized, we have something probably a little less formal
than this but if you have a formalized mentor coaching system how many
protégées can a mentor coach reasonably and really work with at a time?
Do you have a theory?

Christy Cox: I definitely have some theories about that. I don't think
that you can have a whole bunch of time go past and meet quarterly. So I
think you want to make sure that if you have a mentor that has the time
to meet with their protégées and that their protégées have the time to
meet with their mentors. Most often I have seen this where they have
some kind of monthly face to face. So it's kind of a monthly, they see
each other, either the mentor is in the classroom with the protégée or
the protégée is visiting the mentor's classroom or and this can be
applied to also home visiting to bus drivers to new parents in the
program.

I don't want to address it only to teachers. We can think outside that
box and think that there's a mentor for pretty much every role that
happens in Head Start. But there's that option of seeing people face to
face but then following up with things like e-mails or phone calls in
between those monthly face to face times. So then you just kind of
calculate the hours and see how much time is in a month and how much
time does that person need for prepping and being thoughtful in the
mentoring that they're doing.

Some programs have 10 of the 10 protégée mentors and some have more and
less.

Woman: Christy this is (Anne) and (Cherilyn) in Tacoma, Washington.

Woman: Hi. We, our system's a little different and I think we're very
lucky that we have, we're part of the school district. And so we do have
a kind of a blend of the two. We have supervisors who also provide some
teaching strategies and support that they basically monitor. And then we
also have mentors who provide similar support to the classroom but
because they are in the same union as the teachers are there is
sometimes a little question about whether or not the teachers want the
mentors come into their room and give them feedback when they basically
are colleagues.

They have a little problem. Sometimes if the supervisor wants something
specific to happen they can help the mentors to go in the room and help
with a certain activity or strategy but a lot of the time it's got to be
the classroom staff that asks for help from the mentors. And then
sometimes the mentors even get stuck just teaching in the classroom
because the lack of subs that we have in the district right now. So ours
is a little bit of a few things and that's the one big thing and I
wondered if any other programs had that issue of mentors being at the
same level as who they're mentoring.

I guess nobody else does.

Christy Cox: Yeah, I was just waiting for that info too, to come out. I
don't, I didn't hear anything.

Man: Each of these roles, this is (Gene), each of these roles that the
mentor could play is fraught with and comes with some advantages and
some disadvantages and that's one of them that plays it out that way. I
mean certainly this whole supervisor, mentor, protégée relationship has
got to be carefully thought through because any one, you can set up
dynamics whereby the mentor is then the designee of the supervisor and
that really can undermine the whole relationship with the protégée. So I
think the careful thinking about the relationship and the roles and
responsibilities in the first place and then of course finding staff who
can somehow navigate the gray areas and work cooperatively together.

Christy Cox: I agree with you completely. That's great. Thank you
everyone. I appreciate very much your time and energy in phoning in and
participating and by participating I mean using that kind of listening
and I hope that something during the phone call helps you either make
planful decisions or get in contact with somebody that you haven't
talked about this with for a while or think about something giving you
the chance and space to think about this in a way you haven't maybe had
in the past. (Melissa) if you're still on thank you so much for your
contact info.

And I am very open for phone calls and happy to receive e-mails. When
you do end up with the Steps for Success materials on your doorstep and
you're wondering kind of what to do with them and where to go I'm really
happy to listen and help you think through your planning stages for that
as well.

So thank you everyone. I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday.

END