A closer look at the role of mentor teachers in shaping preservice teachers' professional identity

This paper focuses on the extent to which mentoring relationships played a role in creating changes in the professional identity of seven preservice teachers. Semi-structured interviews, observations and reflective journals were used to document the changes experienced by participants as they went through their two placements during their one-year teacher education course. The data indicated that when the mentoring relationships were positive and expectations were met, preservice teachers felt more confident as a teacher. However, for some participants, who experienced a partially negative mentoring relationship, their confidence declined and they felt they did not improve. Implications for practice are discussed.     

What does mentoring mean to experienced teachers? A phenomenological interview study

Abstract

This report investigates mentoring from the perspectives of 7 experienced secondary public school teachers from four different school districts in Oklahoma. The participants' teaching experience ranged from 10 to 30years. The author reviewed the research process and data provided through the teachers' interviews and protocol writings to further explain the nature of mentoring and the benefits of mentoring experienced teachers. The experienced teachers benefited from the mentoring process and their mentoring experiences in two important areas. At the professional level, the teachers gained a sense of self as professional educators. At the personal level, these teachers identified mentoring as a process that worked in almost any situation; in addition, they recognized that conversing about concerns with a knowledgeable colleague was a workable solution for solving issues.     

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk: Pre-service Teachers’ Evaluation of their Mentors

The purpose of this study is to examine the similarities between mentor teachers’ espoused theories and theories-in-use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 mentor teachers to investigate their perceived mentoring roles prior to the placement. Their seven pre-service teachers were also interviewed at the end of the practicum to explore their ideas and evaluation of their mentors’ mentoring practices. The findings suggest that 14 mentor teachers did put into practice their ideas regarding their roles. However, only two mentor teachers appeared to act against their espoused theories. Implications for practice are discussed.     

The role of feedback in teacher mentoring: how coaches,peers, and students affect teacher change

ABSTRACT

Our study contributes to understanding teacher mentoring by exploring impacts of feedback from multiple mentoring sources as teachers with varying levels of experience learned to implement student-centered instruction. Mentees in our study learned to implement a student-centered model, supported by mentoring from students and teachers experienced in the model. We employed qualitative methods to collect and analyze data from two summer schools, with 22 STEM teachers and 47 student-instructors from 15 non-selective, public high schools. Findings include: (a) teachers had positive attitudes towards feedback, (b) feedback from multiple sources changed practice, (c) effective feedback required structure, (d) experienced teachers benefited most from feedback, and (e) student feedback was most valuable. These findings provide strategies to shape future mentoring, informing teachers, administrators, professional development coaches, and teacher educators about critical factors in the use of feedback to improve teaching through mentoring.     

Reading a mentoring situation: one aspect of learning to mentor

This paper describes and interprets the meanings that one novice mentor attributes to ‘reading a mentoring situation’, an organizing metaphor for describing how one experienced teacher of English learns to analyze one aspect of her learning in talking to mentor teachers of English throughout her first year of induction into mentoring. The study revealed that learning to become a mentor is a conscious process of induction into a different teaching context and does not ‘emerge’ naturally from being a good teacher of children. Thus, at an operational level, teacher education programs should prepare teachers for this passage by encouraging the dissemination of in-service courses that allow novice mentors the opportunity to articulate the construction of their new role. Such courses can be structured as ‘learning conversations’ whereby mentors are encouraged to reflect on their roles in the company of fellow mentors, mediated by an experienced mentor of mentors.     

教学指导：促进初任教师专业发展的有效途径

初任教师入职阶段是教师专业发展的关键环节。在这一阶段，安排有经验的教师对其进行教学指导，是促进初任教师专业发展的有效途径之一。文章主要论述教学指导在教师专业发展过程中的作用、教学指导的特点，以及成功教学指导计划的标准等。     

Idiographic roles of cooperating teachers as mentors in pre-service distance teacher education

This study aims to define the roles of cooperating teachers as mentors in the context of distance-learning teacher education. The participants included 358 cooperating teachers who mentored 4th-year student teachers in a Distance English Language Teacher Training Program in Turkey. To determine the roles that were perceived as mentoring roles by the cooperating teachers in the distance practicum, an inventory of 10 primary mentoring functions was constructed. These functions included five primary mentoring roles: ‘self-trainer’, ‘networker, ‘social supporter’, ‘academic supporter’, and ‘psychological supporter’. The results will contribute to an increased understanding of how cooperating teachers perceive their mentoring roles during distance practicums.     

Mentoring among high school teachers: a dynamic and reciprocal group process

In education, mentoring is typically understood as a one‐on‐one relationship between a novice teacher and a more experienced, competent colleague. Through the mentoring relationship, the veteran teacher guides the new teacher into the profession. In this article, the author supports an alternative conception of mentoring by describing how a group of new and experienced high school teachers, committed to changing their teaching practices toward a pedagogy of intellectual engagement, together created the conditions and relationships within their collaborative inquiry group to mentor one another. In the group, novice teachers modeled risk‐taking and vulnerability for their more experienced colleagues. Veteran teachers guided their newer colleagues toward learner‐centered pedagogical possibilities and inquiry practices. Additionally, the group itself, with its norms of open questioning and doubt, trust, collegiality, and a shared purpose, created a collaborative space of mentoring that was dynamic and reciprocal.     

Role reversal within the mentoring dyad: collaborative mentoring on the effective instruction of English language learners

Two purposes guided this mixed‐methods investigation of the collaborative mentoring of teachers in a large school system in the south‐eastern United States. The first was to examine collaborative mentoring as unstructured peer‐to‐peer coaching that emerged spontaneously as teachers shared experiences about effectively teaching English language learners (ELLs). The second was to examine how licensure courses contributed to the emergence of collaborative mentoring. Data collection consisted of questionnaires, mentoring stories, phone interviews, and electronic surveys. After completing courses, 84 teachers reported significant increases in frequency and duration of interactions for sharing best practices with colleagues. The data analysts identified course components, causal links, and catalysts as having created conditions for mentoring. Of 33 novice teachers recently trained in teaching ELLs, most found themselves mentoring veteran teachers yet untrained in teaching this student group. This unexpected reversal of the traditional novice/veteran roles within mentoring dyads addresses a gap in the educational literature.     

Mentors for beginning teachers as middle leaders: the messy work of recontextualising

ABSTRACT

Mentors for beginning teachers in schools are often unacknowledged middle leaders in their schools. Through their work with beginning teachers, they not only provide local leadership in their contexts, they influence and shape the work of the next generation of teachers. Government-funded mentor training for the purpose of supporting beginning teachers in Education Queensland schools commenced in 2014 (Queensland Government. [2017]. Mentoring Beginning Teachers. http://education.qld.gov.au/staff/development/employee/teachers/mentoring.html). In Queensland, Australia, over 3000 experienced teachers have completed a two-day professional learning Mentoring Beginning Teacher (MBT) programme. Upon completion, mentors were expected to design and enact a mentoring programme that met the beginning teachers’ needs in their context, using the dialogic mentoring principles they had learned to fulfil the policy goals of increasing the number of beginning teachers transitioning to full registration. This article draws on Bernstein’s ([2000]. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised ed. Rowman & Littlefield) concepts of recontextualisation, and horizontal and vertical discourses of knowledge to understand how mentor teachers negotiated and enacted their roles as middle leaders in schools in diverse schooling contexts.     

Developing Mentors: An Analysis of Shared Mentoring Practices

Understanding how experienced teachers share and articulate effective mentoring practices can guide efforts to prepare quality mentors. This qualitative study focused on mentoring practices within a teacher-designed student-teaching program conceptualized while the mentor teachers within the program were students in a graduate-level mentoring course and implemented upon the mentors’ completion of their graduate studies. Data sources included interviews and field notes from meetings with mentors and student teachers. The results detail specific mentoring practices: explicit instruction through scaffolding, developing the whole teacher, student-teacher-directed learning, fostering student teachers’ individual practice, explicit mentoring of one another, and reflecting on mentoring. These practices were enabled by program structures such as mentor meetings, an online forum, and mentors’ observation of all student teachers in the program.     

Peer mentoring in the development of beginning secondary science teachers: three case studies

In this study, the researchers examined the effectiveness of a reflective model of peer mentoring in the professional growth of early‐career science teachers. The study was carried out over one academic year with three beginning secondary science teachers. The public school teachers in this study reported that participation in peer mentoring provided a support mechanism through which they developed confidence in risk‐taking and experienced professional growth. Results indicate teachers gained insight into each of the four broad domains of teacher responsibility that were measured, including specific issues relevant to curriculum structure, managing student behavior and classroom safety, utilizing new instructional approaches and negotiating relationships with various stakeholders as part of their professional responsibilities. This study has relevant implications for teacher education and provides a model for peer mentoring that could be considered for implementation as a means of initial support to beginning science teachers.     

Are School-Based Mentors Adequately Equipped to Fulfil Their Roles? A Case Study in Learning to Teach Accounting

Abstract

This article reports on a study that explored how school-based teachers fulfilled their roles as mentors in response to challenges faced by pre-service teachers while learning to teach accounting. Pre-service teachers in their final year at a University of Technology in South Africa and practising teachers from six high schools participated in the study. Pre-service teachers e-mailed reflection journals on a weekly basis over a period of four months to the first author who is a teacher educator. Unstructured interviews were carried out with each pre-service teacher and their respective mentors. The results indicated that not all mentors assisted the pre-service teachers according to the expectations of their roles. Despite mentoring having the potential to enhance the preparation of pre-service teachers, in the cases studied it did not always yield positive results. It became clear that the cumulative nature of the accounting discipline requires a different type of mentoring from other disciplines. In fact, numerous factors revealed in the study influenced the failure and success of mentoring pre-service teachers. Many of these factors are ones over which the university has no control.     

Experiences of beginning teachers in a school‐based mentoring program in Sweden

Even though teacher education has been successful in preparing students for their future profession, the classroom reality can differ greatly from the inservice training. Many novice teachers therefore find the transition from student teacher to inservice teacher overwhelming To support beginning teachers, mentoring programs—where more experienced teachers support novice teachers—have become commonplace in many schools worldwide. In Sweden, mentoring for beginning teachers has been a frequent feature of support since 2001. This study, conducted in Sweden, examines seven novice teachers and the impact the mentoring process had upon them during their first‐year teaching. Based on interviews, it was found that these experienced both professional and personal support from their mentors. The study also showed the significance of observant leaders within the mentorship program following up on the development of the mentor–mentee relationship.     

Operationalizing the mentoring processes as perceived by teacher mentors

ABSTRACT

Mentoring plays a critical role in providing a quality professional experience for pre-service teachers in their initial teacher education. There have been numerous studies about pre-service teacher mentoring, yet actual mentoring practice still remains varied and poorly understood. Consequently, there is a need for mentoring processes that can enhance graduate teacher quality. In response to this call, this study aims to elucidate an understanding of how mentoring is operationalized, as perceived by the teacher mentor. Semi-structure interviews, with experienced teacher mentors, provided understanding on mentoring practices used within differing school contexts. These findings increase our understanding of actual mentoring processes that are used during the different phases of support for the preservice teachers. Understanding how the mentor–mentee relationship is operationalized has implications for supporting and enhancing quality mentoring experiences.     

Mentors’ Perceptions of their Roles with Students in Initial Teacher Training

Issues have been raised in The Cambridge Journal of Education by Edwards and by Booth about how the work of schools and colleges in initial teacher training can be complementary. In the study reported here, arrangements were made for teachers to spend time mentoring students. The students reported feeling the benefit of this. Although the mentors felt that even more time was required for mentoring than was officially allocated, they were positive about the value of mentoring. Their self‐reports showed that they had perceived themselves as playing roles which could be viewed as complementary to, rather than as duplicating, the roles of tutors. Accordingly, the study brings evidence to bear on the current debate about complementarity in the roles of colleges and schools in initial teacher training     

Beginning Elementary Science Teachers: Developing Professional Knowledge During a Limited Mentoring Experience

The professional development project reported on in this paper, the Beginning Elementary Science Teachers' (BEST) project, was based on the premise that the first years of elementary science teaching can be very important in the development of long-term quality science teaching. Specifically, we report on project experiences that allowed 13 beginning teachers to interact with experienced teachers in a university seminar and during school visits. Results show that these limited mentoring experiences can support the development of professional knowledge and discussion centers on factors that facilitate knowledge growth. Conclusions are presented that compare benefits of these limited mentoring experiences to those reported to be achieved in long-term mentoring programs.     

Restructuring and Reculturing: Practicum supervision as professional development for teachers

This paper reports a small case study in which selected experienced co-operating teachers were appointed as school-based teacher educators (SBTE) undertaking a supervisory/ mentoring role for the 3-week period of the first practicum for students in a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education-Secondary (GDE) course. The study identifies any benefits that accrue as a result of changes to the traditional triadic arrangement and any changes in perception about the various roles of participants. The findings illuminate the opportunities for a more collaborative practicum model that has the potential to benefit all participants.