Mentoring is Reciprocal

We are excited to share learning and resources from our innovative USDOE SEED grant-funded program, Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP), currently underway in Massachusetts.

CLEE is supporting early career principals to enact MA DESE's Anti-racist Leadership Competencies while concurrently supporting experienced leaders to serve as mentors in our 12 partner districts.

A core component of CLEE’s Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP) is the mentoring experience in which school leaders discuss dilemmas and successes as they address educational equities in their school context with their mentors. While these meetings are often geared toward the challenges the mentee is facing, the mentor also benefits as they reflect on their own practice.

This year a mentee in the ELAP program identified that their Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) needed to shift from a predominant culture of nice/politeness to more data-focused conversations that included opportunities to check assumptions and biases about students. The mentor identified CLEE’s Cultural Categories of Change as a resource to collaboratively identify and plan specific leadership actions, including build unified expectations, create shared accountability, and support staff members to facilitate PLCs. As a result, staff at the mentee’s school began engaging in deep conversations about student needs and instructional best practices based on data, which led to significant growth for the students they were focusing on.

This prompted the mentor to reflect on collaborative staff conversations at their own school, and identified the What? So What? Now What? Protocol to keep small group conversations focused on best practices. An added bonus was the opportunity for staff to address hidden biases about student data instead of jumping to conclusions outside of the students’ realm of influence. The learning and action that resulted from one structured mentor-mentee meeting was a high impact win-win for both schools!

During the 2024-2025 academic year, this year’s mentees will mentor emerging leaders in their school. Mentoring within the same school context provides an even greater impact on student learning as Fellows lead alongside their mentors and support whole school instructional improvement. Through this collaborative effort, mentees will have greater influence on school-based decision making while also increasing diverse perspectives as part of the leadership team. 

Laryssa Doherty, Continuous Improvement Facilitator and Coach