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12th June 2025

The theme of the workshop was professional development as physical workout.

Aims of the workshop

consolidate and build on existing relationships

welcome new, student teacher participants

revisit group goals

share project experiences: take stock of learning, discuss challenges and make suggestions

explore contents and ways of using new project publication: Focus on pedagogical listening and mentor roles

plan for Sprint 3

Sharing project experiences

36 teachers attended, of whom 6 student teachers, joining us for the fist time.

Participants were seated in their colour groups:

Yellow aka Sunshine Squad

Green aka Emerald Minds

Pink aka The Fun Teachers

Blue aka Sea Waves and

Purple aka Veterans.

Group representatives shared their groups’ thoughts on the project so far. We present these perceptions below, in the order they were shared in; they are organised in Successes and other positives and Struggles, followed by Comments.

Successes and other positives:

The steps of SIRP provide a useful frame for mentor meetings

Mentor meetings perceived as energising - mentoring reminds us of our potential to develop (there’s no ceiling to this!):

“Many times I find myself that I teach and no one is listening. So I question myself: am I that boring? This leads to an uncertainty of the teaching process that I am providing. I teach same classes over and over again and it became a habit. That habit leads to the lack of motivation. And I was stuck in it. But I must say that these meetings bring back my spark. The feeling that I am not alone and I can do this. Not only that I can, but I am doing it. Sharing ideas with another teacher, with a mentor, brings back the good feeling of being a teacher. And I appreciate it. Teacher meetings should be done regularly, weekly, monthly... because teachers support teachers. We should have these meetings even when the project ends, so we can always be the best version of ourselves.”

.... while highlighting our weaknesses:

Emi shared a powerful story of attending her learners’ end-of-school celebration, and seeing in them all the things that she didn’t do as a teacher, which brought tears to her eyes, and ours! Her powerful story was presented as a
poem
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she wrote, which was then put to pop music by AI. We then discussed the importance of humility to teaching, that awareness that we can’t successfully cater to all our learners all of the time, which helps keep complacency at bay.

3. Human mentors preferred by some teachers over Noa, as Noa cannot know one’s context enough, nor can it have any experience. On the other hand, Noa was perceived as always being to the point and difficult to get derailed by chit-chat. → Noa was designed to assist busy mentors when they have scheduling challenges (see Stuggle #2 below, perhaps the most common MMN struggle). Noa was not designed to substitute human mentors - we wouldn’t be looking to grow our human mentoring network if that was the case! Noticing is just a tool; to use a sporting analogy, when one’s personal fitness coach is unavailable, they may be asked to use a programmable exercise bike so they don’t miss a training session. These days you can do the Tour de France from your living room with bikes that increase the resistance when they simulate hill challenges and decrease it ‘downhill’, while providing an immersive experience, e.g. banking, the video of the ride, etc. I might still prefer to ride up Vodno on a nice day, when the traffic is not mad, but not so much on a rainy day, or at 5am when I need to get something out of my system. Needless to say, all professional athletes use all tools at their disposal to make the most of their talents!

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4. Some teachers enjoy pairing off with colleagues from their own schools - it certainly helps when the two of you share a staffroom! On the other hand, knowing someone comes with the risk of bias...

5. Teachers enjoy the face-to-face format of mentoring for its immediacy and the body language, which might get depleted through the medium of a screen.

6. Common topics that get discussed in mentor meetings: classroom discipline, overconfident students, adapting the L2 to learners’ proficiency levels, when and how to give positive feedback and when to hold back, if and to what extent to befriend learners... → It’s interesting that all of these are very much relationships issues and we’ve been seeing a trend here (e.g. we don’t normally talk to a mentor about how to teach the Present Simple!), which goes to suggest that mentoring skills are transferrable to the teaching of other subjects - e.g. maths teachers are likely to experience all of the above too!

7. It’s amazing how different each learner/class is! Mentoring shows this so clearly.

8. Teachers learn practical teaching strategies through mentoring.

Struggles:

It can be difficult to identify a focus in Step 1 of SIRP → Angi suggests that in the event of the mentee struggling in this way, the mentor can ask them to describe a recent lesson to them in as much detail as possible, so the mentor can make a ‘mental video’ of the lesson. While listening to their description, the mentor tries to identify emotionally charged content, e.g. confusion, struggle, puzzlement... and proposes a focus on the basis of that careful listening.

Difficult to schedule times for mentor meetings that work for both - see Success #3 above - Noticing is designed to help exactly with this!

Some mentees don’t appear to see the point of the mentoring process (e.g. “I’m fine, I have no problems in my classroom”) → Mentors to try and help them realise that there is no ceiling to teacher development, i.e. teaching can always be improved. However, being mentored needs to come from a place of need - to use a sporting analogy again, one needs to actively need to work out to do it well. One way to help a mentee realise the importance of mentoring is by allowing them to experience its benefits in a safe environment with the right amount of challenge.

Waivering motivation for professional development:

“I feel like I am constantly pushing someone into doing things they don't want to do. I feel miserable doing that with students when they don't feel like doing a certain task, let alone having to do it with adult professionals who are voluntarily in this project. First, I needed to constantly remind a colleague of his tasks; he didn't even show up for the second meeting. He is not my mentee anymore, but this just adds up to the frustration I’ve been experiencing this year. Then it was my student mentee who didn’t reply to my emails for more than a week. I know that younger generations are all into instant messaging and not checking mails, but I worked with a student last year and this was not the case then. Finally, more pushing seems to be needed within my project group: people seem to take ages to respond, if they respond at all. I am not in the mood to take one for the team. I have done that a lot in the past and I can work a lot, but I can’t be the only one finishing a group task. Maybe people are not interested, maybe they thought the project was something it isn't.”

→ Absolutely, like with anything else in life, motivation needs sustaining! Mentoring is by default collaborative and this can help sustain motivation, e.g. by the mentor breaking down the process into manageable steps for their mentee; the occasional group check-ins have the same purpose. Mentoring may not be for everyone, though, and colleagues will drop out if they don’t feel they need this kind of professional development, which is fair enough. We can push so much! Though some colleagues, e.g. student teachers, might appreciate their mentors to do more chasing up if the logistics of mentoring are anxiety-inducing:

“The consultations with my mentor were useful but infrequent. All of it was on me, she was very helpful but she let me organise the meetings, which translated in me going for weeks without a meeting because I was too panicked to write an email or get on Zoom.”

5. It can feel awkward to mentor someone more experienced than yourself. → This depends on the relationship/trust; see Success #3, would you mind having a competent, though younger than yourself, fitness coach?

6. It can be difficult to prioritise in the moment what to say when, while also listening pedagogically → exactly, it requires lots of practice (see Success #3 above) and we hope the newest publication, the Recipes, will help with this!

7. It can be difficult to refrain from jumping to conclusions and ‘knowing’ the answer to your mentee’s problem with insufficient contextual information (because the context is not your own) → yes, this requires (practising) humility

8. Step 3 can be difficult for teachers who may have lost touch with educational theory → we can make this a focus for our next group meeting!

Comments

We referred to the

Workshop 3 Handout

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for more example reactions from project participants, concluding that, like any other serious workout, developing mentoring skills takes time/practice and can be transformative/rewarding.

All the while, we reflected on our

Group Goals⁠

, on the topic of which, we shared a recent success: we reached out to the Ministry of Education (see policy goal) and were invited to present MMN to the State Secretary Ms Elena Ivanovska on 10th June 2025. She encouraged us to seek formal recognition of our work from the Ministry, which we’re currently working on, with a view to offer our mentoring course for accreditation to the Bureau of Education. Here’s a photo following that meeting:

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We also announced our own Sanja Baloska’s upcoming webinar, to take place on 21st June:

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Sanja’s is one way to make up for currently not being able to attend our face-to-face sessions - we encourage all MMN members to consider our group goals and to take a lead on an initiative, like Sanja did regarding sharing her expertise with the community, and like Mimi, Emi and I did regarding institutionalising our MMN work.

ADDENDUM: On 18th June 2025, Elena and Miroslava met up with colleagues from the Faculty of Natural Sciences involved in preparing future teachers of biology, maths and chemistry. The were friendly, engaged, and face similar mentoring challenges—namely, a lack of trained mentors and staff shortages. They mentioned wanting to accredit mentoring courses but lack trainers to even begin the process. They’re interested in attending our next workshop to see how we work and possibly join our network if we remain aligned. They were curious about Noticing and surprised that we’ve developed a robot (Noa) to support busy mentors! We agreed to meet again in September to plan any concrete actions.

Recipes for Transformative Mentor Meetings

In Workshop 3, we were delighted to be able to launch our latest MMN publication, Recipes for Transformative Mentor Meetings - see a close-up of its cover and blurb here:

About MMN⁠

We worked through the following

tasks

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so teachers can familiarise themselves with the book’s contents, structure and the ways it can be used to support mentoring. More specifically, we worked through the 4 different kinds of pedagogical listening and the 5 different mentor roles outlined in the book to develop shared understandings and confidence in identifying and using this knowledge in our mentoring.

We took a group photo featuring the publication - for more photos from Workshop 3 see

Our photos⁠

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Sprint 3

We first recapped our past sprints for context, before going on to design Sprint 3:

Sprint 1: 17th March - 17th April, 4 mentor meetings (recommedation: 2 with human mentor and 2 with Noa, i.e. 2+2)

Sprint 2: 28th April - 10th June, 3+3

Sprint 3: 16th June - 25th September, 3+3.

For Sprints 1 and 2, we used the mentor conversations listed in the section In the thick of it from the Recipes. This means, we were all teaching during the first two sprints, and it made sense to plan/prepare and reflect on taught lessons with a mentor. Now that teaching has finished, we move on to the section entitled From a distance, again, see the Recipes. Note to those who didn’t pick up a copy of the book: There are some copies left, which you can pick up when we meet up next; if you need access to the Recipes before that, a text-only copy has been shared with MMN here:

Recipes for Transformative Mentor Meetings (text-only)

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The From a distance section features mentor conversations to help teachers prepare for the start of the following school year, e.g. by: formulating goals for themselves, developing materials or assessment, reflecting on the past semester/year, etc. Sprint 3 is about everyone choosing which conversations they want to have with a mentor (this is a perfect opportunity for mentors and mentees to swap roles so everyone experiences both roles, that of a mentor and that of a mentee) and when a human is not available, feel free to chat to Noa. You might want to refer to the

Professional standards for teachers⁠

to get inspired about what aspect of your professional development to work on.

To give an example of how Sprint 3 can be carried out in a mentor-mentee pairing, I’m currently working with Sanja and this might be a way for the two of us to have our 6 mentoring sessions (3+3) in Sprint 3:

Elena does a periodic review with Sanja, i.e. she reflects on the past academic year to see what lessons can be learnt to inform the start of her next academic year

Sanja does a periodic review with Elena

Sanja formulates goals for herself with Elena

Elena has 3 chats with Noa: Setting goals, Anticipating, Developing assessment

Sanja has 3 chats with Noa: Developing materials, Classroom inquiry, Preparing for a talk.

In this way, each of us will have had 6 mentor meetings, 3 human, which we do together, and 3 in Noticing. This is just one way to go about Sprint 3, the combinations are many! And, if there is human availability, you can do all 6 meetings with a human!

If you have a second mentee, you would need to make a similar arrangement with them, too. See the allocations for Sprint 3 here:

Mentor-mentee allocations⁠

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On a less serious note, the summer is an interesting period for mentor meetings - you might be able to meet up f2f more or in locations unavailable to you during the rest of the year, so do share with us your photos of mentor meetings, especially if they take place in an unusual location, e.g. the beach? :)

Remember to log your work in Mosaic - if it’s not in Mosaic, it didn’t happen! :) Your Mosaic records will be taken into account to calculate the hours of training to be featured in your end-of-project certificates. Some colleagues have Mosaic open as they are having their mentor meetings and create the records in real time; indeed, this doesn’t have to be an additional, after-the-event task for the mentee!

P. S. As you will be rotating roles during Sprint 3, you will find that you’re unable to make records of your own if Mosaic recognises you as ‘mentor’. To circumvent this technical issue, mentors will add their own records in their mentees’ profiles; provided it’s clearly stated which record was whose, it shouldn’t be a problem for us!

Project logistics

We started discussing the time for our next whole group face-to-face meeting to exchange our Sprint 3 experiences, and we thought we’d poll the whole group on this:

https://forms.gle/vqfMMKcmaQ9U6SLV8⁠

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Another exciting opportunity to meet before the summer is Angi’s visit, which she had to put back from September to June - she is happy to chat to us on 24th June, from 10am till noon at Blaze Koneski Faculty of Philology - please register (only if you’re seriously planning on attending, though, so we can plan accordingly):

https://forms.gle/ZEykfXFDawLKJnmh8⁠

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Since we have some available slots for new MMN members, we will call for new English language teachers working in the public sector to join us - feel free to spread the call among your own colleagues (e.g. working in your own or a nearby school, so you can meet them f2f more going forward?) who you know may benefit from mentoring:

https://forms.gle/naypfsYsxYFvcqnJ8⁠

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We decided to use our (e.g. social) networks to spread the word about our MMN work, including about our latest publication - this is one area that we feel we have so far neglected, so please help us publicise in whichever way you can!

And, of course, please keep sharing the lovely things you keep realising through mentoring in our

Padlet

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Participants’ reactions

Excellent and enlightening. We should continue better.

This was a good meeting with our colleagues. And professional development.

Insightful, expanded knowledge, professional growth

Loved the dynamics today! We had a great session!

I really enjoyed today’s meeting! It was very productive and engaging!

:) Learned a lot!

I hesitated about this, but now I’m certainly happy that I’ll be part of this project. Even from the first meeting I got to know so many wonderful colleagues, I’m sure I’ll benefit from their experience.

Loved it! <3

The group’s energy is lovely. All the discussions we had were useful. Also, I appreciated the breaks. I would definitely like to be around such people.

So far I have been enjoying this mentoring process, and I look forward to the summer sprint 3.

The meeting was great. Now I can differentiate the types of listening and the mentor roles. It was quite informative and educational.

The meeting showed me where I am in this process. It helps me to appropriately support my mentee’s development.

I had a great time during the session and I truly hope this will become larger! <3

This workshop encouraged me to continue being a part of this project in order to develop more, first as a teacher, then as a mentor!

Inspiring experience. Going out of my usual comfort zone felt exciting. Felt confused about types of listening, will delve into that later on.

I really like this place and it was a little boaring but very intrusting. <3 From Jasmin, Elena’s daughter

“Learnacy” → Respect! Dulevska

It was great! Emi’s poem was the best part of today’s session! :)

I feel super motivated, looking forward to September!

Lovely group of people! I always learn something new and you always exceed my expectations!

Since this was my first meeting, I was excited to join this community. It also made me feel supported that there are so many colleagues that want to be better educators.

MMN gives us double energy. Mentors also need recipes. Continuous growth is essential. <3 Emi inspired me so much today. <3

Informative. Enjoyable.

It was very cool and fascinating to learn from so many driven and dedicated educators. I feel mixed on today’s meeting. Sorry about sentence relevance, I did not sleep well and this is hard right now. I’m quite exhausted. I would like to move more and sit less because my back begins to hurt quickly and intensely.

An absolutely inspiring session which motivated me to further develop professionally, especially as a future teacher. I’m also very excited to start as a human mentor from the new academic year!

Excellent as ever! Keep on going!

Creative and enlightening (clearing things up).

Very informative and well-organised session. Thanks to the team for a great learning experience! :)

Visual reaction:

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ADDENDUM: Following our call for new members from Sprint 3 on, we welcomed 11 new members (5 from the public sector and 6 from the private sector). We held a welcome/orientiation Zoom meeting on 2nd July 2025 (Wednesday) from 9 till 10am, which was attended by 5 colleagues.

Group reflection task for September meeting:

Each small group (Yellow, Green, Pink, Blue, and Purple) will give a short, 10-minute presentation on their experiences of Sprint 3 on the MMN project. This can include lessons learned, challenges faced and how they were addressed, interesting mentoring stories or any ideas and suggestions that came out of your work. This sharing doesn’t have to be a standard verbal report - feel free to explore visual, musical, embodied, or any other expressive formats. You may decide to act out an excerpt from someone's mentoring if you like, and invite us to join you in discussing it! (The latter is an idea that no group has explored so far - feel free to be the first to go where no group has gone before! :))

Whichever format you choose, try to make it meaningful and representative of your group’s journey. Group leads will help coordinate this in whatever way works best for you, synchronously or asynchronously. Group leads not have to do the reporting on top of the coordinating, though - feel free to decide as a group how to distribute the load among the members.

Note to those colleagues who will not be able to make our September meet-up: Please send across your thoughts to your group leads so they can speak in your name. We will also ask you to comment on the whole group's work of 27th September so you can feel that you can keep contributing despite your absence. Another means to show dedication to MMN would be to take a lead on a mini-project - see our group goals and allow yourselves to be inspired:

22nd February 2025 · Group goals⁠

We are seeking to be as inclusive as possible by encouraging colleagues to contribute in their own ways, not necessarily in one way!