Diversity and Mentoring in the Workplace: A Conversation with Belle Rose Ragins

Given projected increases in workplace diversity, an understanding of diversity’s intersection with mentoring is a critical topic in the literature. This article involved an interview with Belle Rose Ragins, one of the world’s leading thinkers on diversity and mentoring in the workplace. After providing an overview of Ragins’ key achievements and contributions to the mentoring literature, the article delved into the interview, which involves four parts: (a) Ragins’ education and early influences; (b) her views on the extant literature as well as insights around future areas for inquiry; (c) her current research interests; and (d) her views on consulting and teaching.     

Mentoring doctoral students online: mentor strategies and challenges

The purpose of our research was to explore faculty members’ experiences with online mentoring during the dissertation stage of an online doctoral program. During semi-structured interviews, four mentors reflected on their online mentoring of students, specifically the strategies that worked well, challenges faced while mentoring online, and other factors that contributed to their mentoring practices. The data revealed the importance of structure, small group mentoring, and peer support in overcoming challenges faced during online communication and the mentoring of dissertations at a distance. Implications for the online mentoring of dissertations are discussed.     

Work‐to‐School Mentoring: Childcare Center Directors and Teachers’ Return to School

As supervisors of preschool teachers, childcare center directors are well‐situated to mentor their staff to pursue higher education. Telephone interviews with 78 directors examined their role as mentors in encouraging preschool teachers to take college classes. Educational mentoring was shown to be distinct from career mentoring. Logistic regressions showed that the director’s educational mentoring of teachers and teachers’ aides was associated with greater college attendance, whereas career mentoring was related to less attendance. Furthermore, the director’s confidence staff members’ ability to complete an Associate’s degree promoted college enrollment. Finally, some directors appeared to be transformational leaders who created an education‐friendly climate for their entire staffs. These findings suggest that the workplace is an under‐researched, critical context for work‐to‐school mentoring.     

Pre-service teachers’ questions about the profession during mentoring group conversations

The use of mentoring group conversations as a tool to support pre-service teachers’ professional development has become more common. However, there is still a lack of research that shows how conversations are used to develop knowledge. The present paper is based on ethnographical observations of mentoring group conversations, and describes how pre-service teachers who participate in an obligatory mentoring model use their conversations as an arena in their search for professional knowledge. Three areas were focused upon during the conversations: the teachers’ role and teaching practice, conditions for professional development and conditions related to the profession. The pre-service teachers mainly used conversations to question, discuss, share and reflect over pedagogical and didactical dilemmas related to teaching activities in the classroom and to their own as well as other teachers’ behaviour and attitudes in different situations. The paper provides an insight into how a mentoring model can contribute to professional preparation.     

The Subject of Mentoring: Towards a Knowledge and Practice Base for Content-focused Mentoring of New Teachers

While new teacher mentoring has traditionally focused on socio-emotional support and professional socialization, understanding mentors’ role in developing novices’ content teaching is needed given new educational reforms. Few researchers have explored a knowledge/practice base for content-focused mentoring. Therefore, we ask: what do content mentors identify as knowledge/practices needed for subject-specific mentoring? How is subject-specific mentoring enacted? What complexities arise? We found: (a) developing novices’ content teaching is a distinct mentor role; (b) a knowledge/practice base, with mentor’s pedagogical content knowledge and knowledge of content-specific assessment most frequently reported; and (c) enactment of content-focused mentoring reveals promising practices in guiding novices in assessing and developing students’ disciplinary thinking, and tensions between content-focused and socio-emotional mentor roles.     

Coaching the Mentor: Facilitating Reflection and Change

The purpose of this study is to explore the process of coaching a mentor of experienced teachers. In particular, we sought to determine if coaching would help a mentor to compare her espoused beliefs about mentoring to her mentoring behaviors and possibly resolve any dissonance. The mentor and coach (the co‐researchers) participated in a platform conference, three coaching conferences, and a debriefing conference. In the platform conference, the mentor espoused the use of nondirective mentoring behaviors. The mentor and coach used the coaching conferences to review audio recordings of the mentor working with mentees during conferences intended to improve the mentees’ teaching, and to engage in reflective dialogue concerning the mentor’s interpersonal behaviors. The mentor experienced cognitive dissonance on several occasions during the coaching conferences when she discovered her use of directive behaviors in some interactions with mentees. Eventually, the mentor resolved this dissonance, primarily by changing her beliefs about mentoring and shifting from a nondirective to an eclectic platform. We conclude that the coaching of mentoring explored in this study has considerable potential for future research on the coaching process.     

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.     

A sociocultural theoretical approach to understanding mentor–mentee interactions during a Teaching English as a Second Language practicum at the master’s degree level

Drawing on the sociocultural theoretical (SCT) perspective, we offer a microgenetic analysis of mentor–mentee interactions in the context of pre-service teachers’ practicum in a Master’s program for Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). Following two pairs of mentors and mentees, we analyze audio-recorded interactions and interviews and examine in depth how mediation occurs during mentoring and how such mediation assists the mentees in learning to become teachers. Our findings show that mentors’ mediation is dynamic and contingent upon the context in which mentoring occurs and that the quality and character of mentor–mentee interactions during goal-directed activities is a critical feature of promoting the mentees’ learning. Responsive mediation especially plays a key role in promoting the mentees’ cognitive development, and it is an essential component of effective mentoring. This calls for a more SCT-informed approach to conceptualizing mentoring and training mentors in practicums.     

Using developmental relationships in mentoring to support novice principals as leaders of learning

Mentoring is an established method of supporting principals as they begin their careers; however, early studies focus on how a veteran principal supports a novice principal in acquiring the skills to manage the school. As the role of a principal has evolved from a building manager to a leader of learning, the role of mentoring has also evolved. The purpose of this study was to explore the mentoring experiences of novice principals and their mentors in a school district’s mentoring program, and how developmental mentoring relationships support novice principals to be leaders of learning. The ?ndings suggest that a strong mentoring relationship can support a novice principal in developing skills to be a leader of learning by clarifying the mentor’s role as a leader of learning, focusing mentoring sessions to build the mentee’s capacity as a leader of learning, and a commitment to mentoring sessions that support teaching and learning.     

引领与协作——社会性别视角下高校女教师的师徒生活研究

师徒制作为重要的在职教师培训模式之一,具有久远的历史渊源。现代师徒制是在对现代学徒制的借鉴和对职业教育的反思基础上产生并加以运用的。师徒生活通过提升教学理念、促进反思性教学、塑造职业性格而提升了高校女教师的课堂生活质量,通过缓解情感危机、养成心理健康、传承职业情感而丰富了女教师的日常生活体验,因女性独特的性别身份对于师生生活的有效性产生了积极的推动作用。     

Engagement Mentoring for ‘Disaffected’ Youth: A new model of mentoring for social inclusion

This article presents a critical analysis of mentoring for social inclusion. It traces its dramatic international expansion as a tool of education policies in the 1990s, and identifies a new model, ‘engagement mentoring’, which seeks to re‐engage ‘disaffected’ young people with the formal labour market, and to engage their commitment to dominant interests through shaping their dispositions in line with ‘employability’. Mentors are treated as vehicles for these objectives, their dispositions also subject to transformation according to gendered stereotypes of care. The model is illustrated by a case study of engagement mentoring, and feminist readings of Bourdieu and Marx are used to relocate it within the socio‐economic context from which it is usually disembedded. The article concludes that engagement mentoring constructs the habitus of both mentor and mentee as a raw material subjected to an emotional labour process.     

Making mentoring explicit: articulating pedagogical knowledge practices

Mentoring pedagogical knowledge is fundamental towards developing preservice teachers’ practices. As a result of a train-the-trainer mentoring programme, this study aimed to understand how mentors’ engagement in a professional development programme on mentoring contributes to their mentoring of pedagogical knowledge practices. This qualitative research analyses the mentoring of pedagogical knowledge from six paired mentor teachers and preservice teachers (n=12) after a four-week professional school experience. Findings indicated that the train-the-trainer model was successful for mentoring pedagogical knowledge on 10 of the 11 advocated practices. This suggested that a well-constructed professional development programme on mentoring can advance the quality of mentoring for enhancing preservice teachers’ practices.     

Juggling the roles of parents,therapists, friends and teachers – a working model for an integrative conception of mentoring

Mentoring programs for youth have become increasingly popular interventions and are generally effective in promoting protégés’ wellbeing and functioning. Building on recent efforts to understand the interpersonal mechanisms underlying mentoring relationships, the authors apply central concepts from attachment, social support and social learning theories and systematically compare the mentor’s role with the roles of other caregivers (parent, therapist, friend, teacher). The authors highlight similarities and differences between mentoring and these roles, and discuss interpersonal dynamics specific to each relationship that can be enacted in mentoring. It is argued that the uniqueness of mentoring rests on mentors’ ability flexibly to transverse these different roles to some degree, without embodying any. Consequently, the authors underscore the existence of different profiles of mentoring relationships and suggest that these might address diverse protégés’ needs. This view serves to articulate specific recommendations for research and practice in light of protégé heterogeneity.     

Peer Group Mentoring Programmes in Finnish Higher Education––Mentors’ Perspectives

Peer mentoring is one of the most important guidance practices for first-year students entering higher education and academic life. We are interested in mentors’ roles and apply the ideas of group counseling in order to increase the understanding of peer mentoring. Other aspects of guidance––content, methods, and collaboration––are approached on the basis of the holistic career guidance model. The data were gathered via an online questionnaire (n?=?784) from 20 Finnish HE institutions. The results show that peer mentoring is a positive experience. The main emphasis is on the personal, psychosocial aspects of the student’s life. We identified four mentor types based on used activities. The experience of mentoring can vary according to the mentor type.     

Adjunct mentoring,a vital responsibility in a changing educational climate: the Lesley University Adjunct Mentoring Program

Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has established an adjunct mentoring process in response to its growing number of adjunct faculty. Lesley’s adjunct corps serves in Lesley programs offered both on and off campus. The primary goals of the mentoring program are to support excellence in teaching, and to engage in mentoring that begins at hiring and provides continued professional development to the adjunct faculty member. This article underscores the general need for adjunct mentoring in postsecondary institutions, and describes Lesley University’s Adjunct Mentoring Program – developed specifically in anticipation and response to this need. The article outlines the program’s main elements, the principles that underlie it, and the place of such a program in higher education today. It is precisely because part‐time faculty members in postsecondary institutions often assume a number of roles – teacher assistant, annually hired adjunct, internship supervisor – that adjunct mentoring programs are a responsibility, and not a choice.     

The Role of the Mentor in Supporting New Teachers: Associations with Self-Efficacy,Reflection, and Quality

In our study, we examined variation in mentoring aspects of an induction program for 77 novice teachers and associations with self-efficacy, reflection, and quality of student–teacher interactions. Mentors’ previous experience and full- vs. part-time status predicted novices’ perception of support, reflection, and observed student–teacher interactions. Time spent with a mentor, participation in mentor-facilitated professional development activities and the quality of mentors’ interactions with novice teachers were related to novice teachers’ perceptions of mentoring success, self-reflection, and efficacy. The data in our study add to the growing research suggesting the need to look within the mentoring experience to more fully understand the working mechanisms and important contributors to their success.     

Mentoring: Towards a Professional Friendship

Mentoring is a rapidly growing area covering the fields of education, business and community. At a fundamental level, mentoring provides individuals with a relationship which builds from a foundation of friendship. This paper looks at the possible role of ‘friendship’ in formal mentoring systems. It analyses the elements and components of friendship and offers a model of ‘professional friendship’ within the formal mentoring context. The model represents what a. mentoring relationship might be at a generic level and the paper argues for a model of ‘professional friendship’ to be integral to quality mentoring.     

Integrating social activity theory and critical discourse analysis: a multilayered methodological model for examining knowledge mediation in mentoring

This study suggests an integrative qualitative methodological framework for capturing complexity in mentoring activity. Specifically, the model examines how historical developments of a discipline direct mentors’ mediation of professional knowledge through the language that they use. The model integrates social activity theory and a framework of critical discourse analysis to guide the data collection, analysis and interpretation processes. Drawing on the case of mentoring in Arts Education, we describe and discuss the discursive character of the interactions between content and pedagogy in mentoring activity, as they grow out of the larger historical groundings of participants’ practice.