Orillia Presentation Descriptions (Oct. 17th, 2026).
9:00-10:15am: Morning Keynote: Jim Strachan
Session Title: Mentoring Essentials for Associate Teachers
Description: In order to support student well-being and learning, we must intentionally foster educator well-being and learning. As we seek to do this, a question worth asking is: how are we supporting ourselves? In this interactive keynote, we’ll explore a variety of practical ideas and tools to support your work as learners, mentors, and leaders. These include:
- Trust
- Goal Setting Conversations
- Scaling Questions
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Associate Teaching as Learning
To support our shared learning, you’re invited to visit our mentoring for mentors site - https://sites.google.com/view/mentoringforall (best viewed on a browser other than Google)
12:45-1:45pm: Lunch Keynote: Marlo Beaucage
Session Title: Mentoring Teacher Candidates
Description: In this presentation, Marlo will provide explicit examples of specific activities and the measuring of success with Teacher Candidates related to the following key points: a) Centering Indigenous Worldviews as the Foundation of Mentoring: Mentoring grows from and with Indigenous Ways of Knowing (WoK), Being, Seeing, and Doing. This centers identity, language, territory, and community values in the learning journey. b) Decolonizing Curriculum and Assessment from the Ground Up: Traditional approaches can reproduce colonial power Dynamics. Decolonizing means re-centering Indigenous knowledge, languages, and ways of knowing.
c) Relationship-Centered Mentoring and Relational Accountability: Learning is relational; trust and reciprocity enable candidates to grow as culturally grounded educators. d) Language, Place, and People: Place-Based and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Language and place anchor identity and worldviews; pedagogy should be responsive to local contexts and cultures. e) Reflection, Transformation, and Structural Change: From Personal Practice to Systemic Impact: Meaningful mentoring requires ongoing reflection and action that challenges inequities in teacher education and schooling systems.
5:30-6:30pm: Dinner Keynote: Primrose Goss
Session Title: The Courage to Grow: Reimagining Feedback as a Tool for Learning and Leadership
Description: What if feedback were viewed not as critique, but as one of the most powerful acts of support we can offer one another? In this inspiring keynote, educators will explore how feedback can strengthen mentoring relationships, accelerate professional growth, and cultivate cultures of openness and learning. By examining the intersection of trust, reflection, and leadership, participants will gain practical insights into creating environments where feedback is both valued and actionable. This session challenges educators to rethink feedback as an essential pathway to individual and collective excellence.
Session A Speakers: 10:30-11:30am
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Speaker: Dr. Susan Hopkins
Title: More Than a Role: Mentorship as a Self-Reg Haven
Description: Everyone deserves a mentor who sees who they are becoming before they can see it themselves. And everyone has the capacity to be that person for someone else. Mentorship shows up in many moments and contexts, both formal and informal, and this session honours all of them. Drawing on The 5 Look Fors, Co-Reg, and the Energy-Tension Matrix, we explore stress states, interbrain connections, and what it really means to show up for one another in a Self-Reg Haven. Leave seeing mentorship a little differently than when you walked in. |
Speaker: Marg Moran
Title: Effective Educators Evolve Through the Power of Exceptional Mentorship.
Description:
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Speaker: Dr. Tom Russell
Title: Teacher Educator's Biggest Challenge: Teaching Reflective Practice
Description: The teacher education literature has many different perspectives on reflective practice. At the same time, traditional mentorship strategies make it very difficult to teach reflective practice. In this session, I will share positive and negative experiences and offer strategies for teaching reflective practice to individuals who are just learning how to teach and how to think about teaching. |
Speaker: Noa Daniel
Title: From Host Teacher to Mentor
Description: Supporting associate teachers to navigate the practicum experiences of preservice teachers. This session will focus on five core practices of mentoring preservice teachers: a) Mentoring from who you are--understanding how your beliefs shape the experience; b) Building trusting relationships-- creating the conditions for growth; c) Offering feedback that grows--engaging in dialogue, not delivery; d) Navigating tension with intention--taking a stance of support vs. a stance of evaluation; e) Leading through inquiry--using questions to open thinking and deepen practice. |
Session B Speakers: 11:45-12:45pm
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Speaker: Dr. Glenda Black
Title: Sharing the Journey: Developing Teacher Candidates’ Professional Growth through Mentorship
Description: Mentoring in teacher education is a shared interpersonal journey with a focus on developing and supporting teacher candidates’ professional identity, encompassing relationships and purposeful interactions to enhance confidence and professional growth. The primary objectives of this discussion will be the role and skills required to provide effective mentorship for teacher candidates at the board and university levels; key aspects of mentorship and resources for teacher candidates and new teachers in Ontario; and the focus areas for mentorship, including building confidence, reflective practice, and support for diverse learners. |
Speaker: Jason Pratt
Title: Creating Exemplary Conditions for Beginning Teachers
Description: Effective mentorship benefits not only new teachers but also experienced educators seeking continued growth. Jason will share practical strategies that help schools create supportive, relationship-centered mentoring experiences that strengthen both teacher success and student learning. |
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Speaker: Jennifer Della Mea
Title: Mentorship in Secondary Schools and the Importance of Human Connection
Description: This presentation will explore the role of mentorship in Ontario secondary schools, emphasizing the importance of genuine human connection in student-teacher development as well as new colleague relationships. The discussion will establish that effective mentorship goes beyond academic guidance, fostering trust, empathy, and a sense of belonging in secondary schools. Drawing on classroom examples and educator experiences, the speaker will highlight how strong relationships can improve teacher-student engagement, teacher resilience, and overall well-being. The presentation will also address challenges such as time constraints and systemic barriers that can limit meaningful interactions. Strategies for building authentic connections, including active listening and culturally responsive practices, will be shared as practical tools for educators. Overall, the presentation will underscore that human connection is central to impactful mentorship and student success. |
Speaker: Joanne Lombardi
Title: Making the Implicit Explicit: Strengthening Mentorship Relationships in Practicum
Description: This session explores how strong practicum experiences are grounded in intentional, well-supported relationships between teacher candidates, associate teachers, and faculty partners. While mentorship is often understood as relational, many challenges arise not from intent, but from unclear or unspoken expectations. This session introduces a practical framework for making expectations explicit in ways that strengthen trust, communication, and professional growth. Through real examples and applied scenarios, participants will examine how clarity around planning, feedback, and professional practice can reduce friction and support more effective mentorship. Participants will leave with practical tools and shared language that can be used immediately to support more consistent and successful practicum experiences. |
Session C Speakers: 2:00-3:00pm
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Speaker: Dr. Lana Parker
Title: Building Reciprocity: A Guide to Mentoring as an Ethical Relation
Description: In this talk, I will explore how an ethical underpinning can guide mentoring away from hierarchical transactions and toward long-term relations of care. I will briefly discuss the historical ideas about mentoring and how reciprocal learning differs. I will also provide insights into what constitutes a reciprocal learning approach, with a focus on affect, attitudes, and stance. In addition, I will offer some practical strategies to foster these relations of care in schools, among teachers with differing experiences and expertise. Finally, I will respond to some common concerns that educators encounter in their mentoring work and engage the audience in discussion about possible ways forward. |
Speaker: Brian Weishar
Title: What to Learn and Unlearn: Mentoring in the Midst of Change in the English Classroom
Description: From social media to the science of reading, from AI to culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, Language/English teachers have navigated a number of significant changes in how and what we decide to teach in English Language Arts classrooms. This session will explore some of those changes and what they mean for mentoring the next generation of teachers of the Language and English curriculum in Ontario, especially as we ourselves are learning and coping with new realities. This exploration will include looking at the perspectives of teacher candidates and beginning teachers about what they think is important to know and learn as new educators. |
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Speaker: Lorelei Bunkowsky
Title: Fostering Inclusive Leadership: Mentorship and Diversity in Teacher Candidate Support
Description: In this session, we will explore the intertwined roles of mentorship and leadership in supporting teacher candidates, with a focus on fostering diversity within educational environments. We'll discuss how cultivating strong supports for teacher candidates can lead to pathways for greater equity and leadership. Emphasizing the reciprocity of mentorship, we will highlight how teacher candidates enrich the learning experience for their mentors, creating mutually beneficial relationships. The conversation will also focus on the importance of selecting mentors who are adept at guiding candidates from diverse and marginalized backgrounds, ensuring that all voices are represented in education. Join us to learn how a systemic approach to mentorship can empower teacher candidates and transform our schools into inclusive spaces that thrive on diversity. |
Speaker: Luke LeClair & Sophia Lombardi
Title: The Passion We Pass On: The Ripple Effect of Mentorship
Description: No educator becomes who they are alone. Through our individual experiences as recent teacher candidates, we explore the people and moments that shaped our passion for teaching and the educators we are working to be. This session explores the ripple effect that begins when one educator imparts their passion, experience, and belief in another, and how that influence continues long after the mentorship ends. Together, we invite participants to consider not only who shaped them, but the responsibility that comes with shaping someone else. Mentorship is more than taking on a role; it is choosing, with purpose, to invest in another educator and the impact they will carry forward. |
Session D Speakers: 3:15-4:15pm
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Speakers: Dr. Finney Cherian & Syed Ali Nasir Zaidi
Title: Revisioning Teacher Education: Building an Ecology of Transformative Mentorship through University–School Partnerships
Description: This presentation examines mentorship as a transformative and relational practice in teacher education. Building on Henry Giroux’s concept of teachers as transformative intellectuals, we introduce the Reflexive Craft-Focused Learning Relationships (RCFLR) framework, which foregrounds reflexivity, co-constructed learning, and sustained relational negotiation in mentoring teacher candidates. Drawing on a Professional Development School (PDS) partnership at the University of Windsor and field partners, the presentation illustrates how faculty advisors, associate teachers, school administrators, and board leadership collaboratively enact an ecology of mentorship. Grounded in Communities of Practice and informed by the Ontario New Teacher Induction Framework, this model emphasizes coordinated, practice-based learning across institutional contexts. Framed through a Kintsugi lens, mentorship is positioned not as a means to eliminate the fractures within teacher education, but as a relational practice that makes them visible and pedagogically productive. The session highlights how such an approach supports teacher candidates in navigating the complexities of contemporary classrooms while fostering more coherent, reflective, and sustainable professional development. |
Speaker: Kym Geddes
Title: From Complexity to Clarity: Coaching Others to Communicate What Matters Most
Description: Applying decades of broadcast journalism, executive coaching, and leadership mentoring to help others organize ideas, sharpen messages, and communicate with purpose. Key Takeaways:
Impact: Participants will learn practical coaching strategies that help mentees think more clearly, communicate more effectively, and increase their influence. |
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Speaker: Domenic Scuglia
Title: Nurturing Future Educators: Building Impactful Mentorship Relationships
Description: Join us for an interactive 60-minute workshop exploring the vital role host teachers play in guiding and empowering student teachers. Moving beyond traditional evaluation, this session focuses on building trust, fostering a growth mindset, and creating a safe, equity-focused space for professional learning. Participants will gain practical coaching tools to effectively co-plan, deliver actionable feedback, navigate challenging conversations, and support a smooth transition from student teacher to confident colleague. Key Takeaways:
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Speaker: Laura Lee Millard Smith
Title: Reimagining Teacher Candidate Evaluation for a One‑Year B.Ed.: A Professional Consultation
Description: With Ontario’s transition to a one‑year Bachelor of Education program, practicum assessment must evolve to remain authentic, coherent, and aligned with the expectations of the teaching profession. This session invites associate teachers, principals, and school leaders to participate in a structured consultation on redesigning Lakehead University’s teacher‑candidate evaluation framework. Using the current formative and summative assessments, the Practicum Guide, the Ministry’s NTIP competencies, and key Ontario College of Teachers resources—including the Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession, Ethical Standards, Foundations of Professional Practice, and the Teacher Performance Appraisal framework—participants will help identify what evidence best reflects a developing teacher’s practice in a compressed program model. This interactive session focuses on gathering practitioner insight: what should remain, what should change, and what authentic assessment looks like in real classrooms. Input from participants will directly inform the development of a streamlined, profession‑aligned evaluation model that supports teacher candidates and strengthens the transition from B.Ed. to NTIP and beyond. |