ROCK HILL—Beginning this fall, the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA) and the South Carolina State Department of Education’s Division of Educator Quality and Leadership will co-host regional South Carolina Mentor Trainings.

These three-day foundational trainings focus on the knowledge, skills, and understandings critical to those accomplished teachers who work with beginning teachers. Mentor trainings are guided by the belief that learning to teach is a career-long developmental process that involves continuous cycle of planning, teaching, and reflecting. At the heart of this work is the mentor’s ability to respond to each new teacher’s individual developmental and contextual needs and to promote the ongoing examination of classroom practice.

Trainings this fall will assist school districts in building a cohort of trained mentors to meet the South Carolina Mentoring and Induction Guidelines. Upon completion of the training, participants will become certified mentors for South Carolina.

Remaining training dates and locations are:

• October 15-17: Wilkins Conference Center, Greenville

• November 5-7: USC-Aiken, Aiken

• November 12-14: Olympia Professional Development Center, Columbia

• November 14-16: Poyner Adult and Community Education Center, Florence

Educators and administrators wishing to attend an upcoming training need to register online at www.cerra.org or click the links above.

CERRA, an independent state agency located on the campus of Winthrop University, is the oldest and most established teacher recruitment program in the country. The purpose of CERRA is to provide leadership in identifying, attracting, placing and retaining well-qualified individuals for the teaching profession in South Carolina. CERRA’s programs have been adopted at school, district and state levels in more than 30 states in the United States.