Who am I as a leader?

When reflecting on who I am as a leader, I typically refer back to my job title, 'Mentor Teacher'. As a Mentor Teacher I work with young children as well as pre-service teachers at the Campus Children's School at UVM. This means my role as a leader changes throughout the day. I also co-teach with another person, so some days I take on a larger leadership role than others. 

Every semester at our school is different because we have new students who come into the program. I have learned that it is important to get to know the students that I will be working with on an everyday basis in order to effectively lead them in a classroom setting. Many times what works for one student doesn't work for the next, so I have learned that it is important to flex your style within the means of your setting. Our students have to take observations daily in order to build curriculum for the children. When mentoring students on the best way to go about this process, I try to put myself in the student's shoes and often reflect back on my time as an undergraduate in the same program that they are in now. 

I have learned a lot about the different ways to communicate, especially with undergraduate students. The flow of our day is so fast-paced and there isn't a lot of time to sit down with each student individually and explain to them how things work in our classroom, so I often give feedback and instruction fairly quickly. In the first few years of my teaching I realized that this was not an effective way to communication with these students, some of them having just turned 18. I quickly found that the more explicit I was, the easier the student would have, even with the simplest of tasks. This meant that I had to strategically find the times to have these important conversations, as to not to disrupt the learning of the young children. 

One of the biggest things that I have found to be challenging in my role as a leader has been releasing some control. I know that it takes time for students to adjust to the classroom and feel comfortable handling things in a similar manner as myself or my co-teacher. A lot of that is based on relationships which take time to build, and being that they are fairly new to the classroom plays a huge role in developing their leadership skills. However, being able to relinquish  the control is a necessity in our environment. The students we work with are in our classroom for their practicum setting anywhere from 9 hours to 25 hours a week. Towards the end of the semester there is a week called, 'Leadership Week' which allows them to practice these skills on their own, without the Mentor Teachers present. My goal is that students will feel confident and comfortable doing this, because the children are ultimately the ones dealing with the repercussions if we have a student who cannot manage a classroom with their peers.  

As I stated above, every semester brings new students with different skill sets, allowing me to adapt my view of myself as a leader and learn alongside them.