Mentors have arguably the most significant role in the professional development of novice educators. They need to ensure that their mentees stay the course of their career growth through a holistic approach. In this scenario, even though all students can pass with perfect scores, it is improbable. Furthermore, there is more to professional development and evaluation than just students’ performance. Therefore, in response, the mentor should complement this information with a process and formative evaluations to ensure the novice educator performs her professional duties as required.
Process evaluation is about determining whether the given program’s activities have undergone implementation as intended and resulted in specific desired outputs. In this regard, the mentor can inquire from the mentee how she went about implementing the program (Limbani et al., 2019). Moreover, he or she can question the efficacy of the process to ensure that the students’ excellence was a result of both effort and proper implementation (Limbani et al., 2019). This would extend to analyzing the delivery and how the entire process was conducted. This ensures that the novice educator stays within the confines of her career requirements and the intended programs.
Additionally, the mentor should evaluate students’ level of understanding in a process referred to as formative evaluation. In this assessment, the person can summon one of the students and ask them to present a paper on one of the areas covered by the novice educator (Henry et al., 2017). This extends to the analysis of whether students’ demands were met in full as required. As a result, the mentor will tell whether his or her mentee performed their role adequately, which resulted in the perfect scores she was talking about (Henry et al., 2017). This helps the novice educator to make adjustments as required and ensures that she prioritizes comprehension and understanding over results.
Novice educators often lack the requisite experience in their professional development. Just as in the scenario above, they might be blindsided by one aspect and forget to look at others. This is why mentors need to ensure that these individuals are evaluated wholly for their growth and development. Moreover, students need to be encouraged to be honest to these educators as they are an integral piece of their evaluation.
References
Henry, G., Smith, A., Kershaw, D., & Zulli, R. (2017). Formative evaluation. American Journal of Evaluation, 34(4), 465-485. Web.
Limbani, F., Goudge, J., Joshi, R., Maar, M., Miranda, J., Oldenburg, B., Parker, G., Amalia, M. P., Riddell, M. A., Salam, A., Trieu, K., Thrift, A. G., Van Olmen, J., Vedanthan, R., Webster, R., Yeates, K., Webster, J., & The Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, Process Evaluation Working Group (2019). Process evaluation in the field: Global learnings from seven implementation research hypertension projects in low-and middle-income countries. BMC Public Health, 19(1), 100-112. Web.