Essential concepts, tools, and practices  (Page 3/14)

To Access your Personal File Storage

• You'll have access to your Personal File Storage anytime you log on and you are on the "Class List" screen. (The "Class List" screen is thefirst page you see after you log on.)
• When the "Class List" page comes up, look ABOVE the orange bar and all the way to the right. You'll see the words in blue that say "Personal FileStorage."
• Click on the blue words that say "Personal File Storage."
  To get to the "Class List" screen right now, click on the "Exit" button at the bottom of this page all the way to your right.

Feedback on assignments

The Personal File Storage document on the previous page tells you how to retrieve your file so that you can read your Mentor'sfeedback. (Usually it will take a few days to receive feedback on submitted assignments.) What follows on the next few pages is a description of how yourMentor will offer feedback. These pages are excerpts from our "Mentor Guidebook" that describe to Mentors how to offer feedback to you (theLearner) when they receive your completed assignments.

We are providing this information to you now for the following two reasons:

• So that you'll understand the format in which you'll receive feedback from your Mentor.
• You may wish to try this model of giving feedback in working with your own students. We have outlined 4 Elements of Effective Feedback in our Mentor Guidebook that you may wish to use in your own classroom. Please knowthat you are not required to use this form of feedback for your own students while taking the Certificate of Teaching Mastery. It issimply a tool being made available to you, if you find it useful in your classroom.

Here begins the several-page excerpt from our Mentor Guidebook:

Our Role as Mentors

As Mentors, we have a choice about how to offer feedback to our Learners. We can take the route of "the doubting game" the predominantwestern model that includes "argument, debate, criticism, and extrication of the self" as a way of knowing, or we can take the route of the"believing game," which challenges us "to listen, affirm, enter in, try to put ourselves into the skin of people with other perceptions and asks us toshare our experience with others." In Writing Without Teachers Peter Elbow discusses these two games - the need for both, and the realms in which each game worksbest.

Most likely you will need to utilize a bit of both "games " in your role as Mentor. For giving feedback on assignments, however, weemphasize the "believing game."

We ask our Mentors to develop and use their "believing muscle" - that is "to understand ideas from the inside." As Peter Elbowwrites, "The believing game is constant practice in getting the mind to see or think what is new, different...[the believing game]emphasizes a model of knowing as an act of constructing, an act of investment, an act ofinvolvement..." (p. 173, )

The believing game

What does it mean to "listen, affirm, enter in" when we speak of giving feedback to Learners?