Teacher Mentoring

Mentoring is a popular form of teacher education involving a formal program of training by highly experienced teachers for new teachers, or teachers seeking professional renewal. Although examples of informal mentoring among teachers can be found in literature, systematically organized and often state-mandated programs of formal teacher mentoring have only become widespread since the 1970s. While differing widely in content and duration, most teacher mentoring programs are designed to offer feedback about instructional delivery in a non-judgmental manner in order to catalyze enhanced teacher effectiveness in helping students achieve academically.

Keywords Community Orientation; Confidentiality; Curricular Differentiation; Exit Strategy; Generativity; High-Potential Mentorship; Induction; Mentoring Culture; Mentoring Stance; Non-Judgmental Feedback; Professional Community; Reflective Practitioner; Self-Assessment

Teacher Education > Mentoring

Overview

Although numerous educational articles begin by citing the earliest use of the term "mentor" in Homer's Odyssey, the authors of these articles often mistake what Homer actually wrote about the character Mentor. Before setting forth from his household in order to fight in the Trojan Wars, Odysseus did instruct his old friend Mentor to protect his wife and son and keep everything intact while he was gone, supporting the notion that Mentor was a trusted advisor and a wise friend. Unfortunately, Mentor fails miserably in protecting the household of Odysseus. The goddess Athena, daughter of Zeus, the head of the Greek divine pantheon, disguised herself as Mentor and kept domestic affairs solvent until the return of Odysseus a decade later.

As the story suggests, mentoring entails a relationship bound by trust between two individuals in which one, rightly or wrongly, trusts highly in the other's competency to achieve an objective. Additionally, the Homeric tale proposes that mentoring involves a fusion of different identities and characteristics: masculine and feminine, direct and indirect intervention, planned intention and spontaneous inspiration.

The Homeric interpretation of "mentor" suggests that mentoring does not uniformly bring about the desired objective. This is particularly important in considering the various contemporary views of teacher mentoring, since some advocates of mentoring claim that it will surely reduce teacher attrition and raise instructional standards. A number of educational researchers strongly dispute these claims, pointing to new teachers rejecting assigned mentors in favor of utilizing family or friends outside the teaching profession in a mentoring role (Lindgren, 2005).

Defining Mentoring

To define teacher mentoring as it has been commonly used in educational systems in North America, Europe, and Australia since the 1970s, the following general definition can serve. Teacher mentoring is a formal process of helping a new teacher, or a teacher seeking professional renewal, through an intense dialogue with a highly evaluated, widely experienced educator. The object of such dialogue is to assist the mentee in establishing realistic performance benchmarks for teaching and to feel intellectually and psychologically connected to a fellow educator "as a guide, a supporter, a friend, an advocate, and a role model" (Pitton, 2006).

Although rarely mentioned in Western educational literature, such a dialogue has occasionally also occurred in which the mentee unintentionally educates the mentor. This kind of sudden reversal mentoring is commonly found in both folkloric and educational literature of the non-Western world. The following narrative is used in the instruction of Buddhist clergy in Asia today:

Our schoolmaster used to take a nap every afternoon," related a disciple of Soyen Shaku. "We children asked him why he did it and he told us: 'I go to dreamland to meet the old sages just as Confucius did.' When Confucius slept, he would dream of ancient sages and later tell his followers about them. "It was extremely hot one day so some of us took a nap. Our schoolmaster scolded us. 'We went to dreamland to meet the ancient sages the same as Confucius did,' we explained. 'What was the message from the sages?' our schoolmaster demanded. One of us replied: 'We went to dreamland and met the sages and asked them if our schoolmaster came there every afternoon, but they said they had never seen any such fellow' (Reps & Senzaki, 1957).

As this teaching story indicates, many Asian models of mentoring easily embrace principles of paradox, ambiguity and contradiction. These qualities are not strangers in classrooms anywhere - yet mentoring in North American and European schools foreground teaching as a highly logical, progressively linear, and direct process; an abstract ideal far removed from real classrooms saturated with students who might both wish - and not wish-- to learn, and teachers who are flummoxed about how to address this disinterest.

Increasingly, teacher mentoring has also come to imply a mentee's systematic entry into understanding and participation in school culture and in the community beyond the school. This has been a consequence of realizing that "learning communities" (networks of individuals who are knowledge resources for teachers) exist plentifully beyond as well as within school campuses and might supply valuable classroom visitors for students and teachers alike. Included in this population are retired teachers who might have the time and interest to mentor active teachers, and who belong to national organizations like AARP's Educator Community, formerly identified as the National Retired Teachers Association.

Mentoring & Induction

The parameters of the term "teacher mentoring" have expanded into the realm formerly demarcated by the term induction. Induction once was sharply defined in educational literature as referring to a broad spectrum of activities geared to novice teachers that included one-to-one mentoring and community orientation, but additionally encompassed peer study groups, team planning and teaching, and telementoring, mentoring through videoconferencing and Internet communication. (Strong, 2005). In the 21st century, the term induction, in the educational literature, is often replaced by mentoring.

The Mentoring Stance

The term mentoring stance is utilized to refer to a style of mentoring: coaching, collaboration, or consulting (Lipton, 2003).

• Coaching implies a one-to-one working relationship with one teacher, the mentor, defined as possessing more professional and/or intellectual authority than the mentee.

• Collaboration implies a working relationship of equals professionally.

• Consulting implies that the mentor has a status outside of the department or school when the mentee is employed.

Each of these mentoring styles has pluses and minuses, with the coaching style the most dominant worldwide.

Mentoring Culture

Another term refining the general notion of mentoring is mentoring culture. A mentoring culture is created by school leaders at the grade-level, departmental level, and cross-disciplinary team level who supervise and evaluate the professional growth of new teachers or experienced teachers needing a rebirth of dedication and focus (Campbell & Brummett, 2007). A mentoring culture is an environment enhancing daily the possibility of professional growth through discussion of classroom practice. Within a mentoring culture, teachers needing guidance in dealing with complex challenges like curricular differentiation - how standardized curriculum can be tailored to meet the differing learning styles of students - can learn from teachers who have been through that challenge over the years and have developed tools of the trade to address it. In the 21st century in U.S. schools, the largest concern with mentoring cultures may be connected to the intensification of pressures for students to pass standardized subject-area tests under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

Benefits of Mentoring

Any style or schedule of mentoring takes a teacher's many daily frustrations as prima material, raw material to transmute into useful knowledge. However contested the theory that new teachers drop out of the profession at the astonishing rate they do in the U.S. due to the lack of systematically efficacious mentoring, there is general agreement that teaching is a high-stress occupation. Mentoring allows new or highly frustrated experienced teachers to have someone to discuss these constant occupational tensions, and that seems to suggest a therapeutic advantage over the experience of an educator having to weather those tensions in isolation from other professionals in the field.

Confidentiality is crucial to the quality of any teacher mentoring relationship. Confidentiality assures that the mentee will not be embarrassed by having his or her most vulnerable moments in the classroom exposed to other faculty. To feel like a respected member of a professional community can help a frustrated teacher feel the strength of belonging to a group where the burdens of the job are shared.

When mentoring reflects, as is often the case, a difference in age between the mentor and mentee, the mentoring process gives the young educator a glimpse of the influence he or she may have on the lives of students over the long-run. The psychologist Erik Erikson has identified a universal human need to leave a mark on the lives of others as we confront our mortality that he calls generativity; and he views no human life cycle fulfilled without it (Erikson, 1994). This long view of a teaching career is a unique gift that an older teacher can communicate to a new educator.

Applications

Effective Mentoring Programs

For any mentoring program to be effective, it needs to take into account the issues beginning teachers, teachers returning to the profession after a significant absence, or teachers suffering severe burn out, regularly experience. Rowley (2006) lists the top eight problems as follows:

• Classroom discipline

• Motivating students

• Dealing with individual differences

• Assessing student work

• Relationship with parents

• Planning and organizing class work

• Lack of materials and supplies

• Students' personal problems

If those challenges are not daunting enough, it is just as crucial that a mentoring program address whether or not teachers who would profit from mentoring believe that they have the actual power to improve their teaching through implementing input from a mentor (Davis & Metzger 2006). If teachers frustrated with their work handle their dissatisfaction by blaming it squarely upon an educational system they view as rigidly resistant to reform, there is little likelihood that any mentoring program will help them. This is a paradox that needs to be addressed when designing and applying a teacher mentoring program: often the teachers who would most professionally profit from a teacher mentoring program are those who are most unwilling to assume personal responsibility for learning and applying the tools needed for professional growth. New teachers, or experienced teachers in crisis, are often overwhelmed by feelings of professional inadequacy and project their difficult emotions upon educational administrators, who then become the cause of job discomfort.

Successful Matching of Mentor & Mentee

Mentoring touches sensitive emotional areas in all parties involved. One way to address this problem is for educational administrators to assign teachers widely respected by their students and peers for fairness and non-judgmental feedback to observations and conferences with new or challenged experienced teachers at the beginning of the school year. Indeed, many States in the U.S. even mandate mentoring from a fellow teacher in order for a permanent teaching license to be obtained (Norman & Ganser, 2004). But mandated teacher mentoring cannot assure that mentees will necessarily be assigned appropriate mentors.

Ground Rules & Scheduling

Another method to facilitating teacher mentoring involves the mentor and mentee creating a contract establishing the ground rules that need to prevail during mentoring interactions (Pitton, 2006). Since establishing trust and open communication among professionals is never an easy task, spelling out the rules for communication can limit acts of ego-aggrandizement or more subtle forms of psychological manipulation.

Scheduling of mentoring observations and conferences for new teachers can vary from weekly (Davis & Metzger, 2006) to bi-monthly. In some states, this may be determined by the Teaching Licensing board's requirements for a number of required mentored hours needed for a full-status teaching license to be granted. One of the most ambitiously conceptualized designs for scheduling a year of mentoring has been developed by Udelhofen and Larson (2003). Here is the month by month summary of the mentoring subjects they propose:

• Month 1: Introducing mentees to critical reflection

• Month 2: Exploring current school reality

• Month 3: Analyzing professional practice

• Month 4: Analyzing classroom environment

• Month 5: Understanding assessment

• Month 6: Understanding content standards and curriculum

• Month 7: Analyzing instructional methods

• Month 8: Setting goals

• Month 9: Writing a professional development plan

• Months 10-12: Reviewing issues of previous nine months in order to sustain momentum.

The three months for reviewing the year's mentoring would occur during the summer, when most teachers are away from actual classroom contact. Also worth noting is that this plan offers mentoring to the teacher by introducing the big picture of the school before funneling down into a mentee's particular classroom. Many teacher mentoring programs fail to comprehensively present this school panorama before focusing upon the mentee's classroom, creating in the mentored teacher a sense of potentially excessive responsibility for classroom problems that might have their origin beyond the classroom.

Whatever the schedule, any comprehensive teacher mentoring program should include an exit strategy. This refers to a planned cessation of mentoring when certain mutually agreed upon objectives established by mentor and mentee are met. Without a clear exit strategy, teacher mentoring might devolve into a meaningless habit or obligation.

The Importance of Reflection

The goal of most teacher mentoring programs is to help the mentee become a reflective practitioner; an educational professional constantly concerned with developing his or her knowledge base about the subject they are teaching and pedagogy employed. Reflective practice entails years of classroom practice - and many mentoring programs for new teachers barely last a year. That is why the application of teacher mentoring programs entails concise overviews of pedagogies, particularly in an age where educational technology offers new learning opportunities for teachers as well as students - but requires extensive training time at computers (Booher & Taylor, 1999). It is prudent to view teacher mentoring as an aid to teach education - not an all-encompassing approach. At best, the mentee experiences his or her mentor as an influential and informative educator who amplifies the lessons learned about teaching in undergraduate or graduate-level education courses.

Non-Judgmental Feedback

The conference between mentor and mentee is either led by the mentee's questions or the mentor's classroom observations. Questions about classroom practice should fit into a strategy where a mentor can offer non-judgmental feedback so that the mentee responding to mentor queries is assured a safe reception for statements of puzzlement and vulnerability. The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, a U.S.-Canadian coalition of professional education associations, evaluations (should) be conducted legally, ethically, and with due respect for the welfare of those involved. The same standard should hold completely true for all facets of teacher mentoring.

Viewpoints

Mentoring & Teacher Retention

Teaching mentoring, like other popular educational trends of the past three decades, has been the subject of a highly polarized debate. The debate surrounding it is less about whether teacher mentoring is a desirable activity - after all, 60% of U.S. States require it by law as of 2003 -- but whether it reduces the attrition rate of new teachers. Ascertaining this fact is made difficult by the absence of comprehensive national statistics on the number of teachers yearly who enter the profession with the intent to transition into a different career after a few years of service. A body of anecdotal evidence exists to support the belief that a considerable number of teachers have no intention of maintaining teaching as their sole career; yet systematically collected data in rigorous empirical studies do not support such a conclusion (Strong, 2005).

Further complicating the attempt to link teacher retention to teacher mentoring is the wide spectrum of vastly different teacher mentoring programs. To generalize about the impact of teaching mentoring even for States that share a common border is impossible. Teacher retention in inner-city schools plagued with violence will likely have lower rates regardless of the existence and efficacy of teacher mentoring programs.

The Problem of Self-Assessment

A philosophical objection to teacher mentoring involves how accurate any educator's self-assessment can ever be, regardless of the type of mentoring program. The occupation demands of its professionals a high degree of selfless, or disinterested, dedication, and such a commitment might interfere with accurate self-assessment. On the one hand, teachers might inflate the perception of their professional competency in order to compensate for poor wages and working conditions. Conversely, they might underestimate their professional competency as a defense against thinking about the injustice of their working conditions and wages. Rigorous objectivity about one's own performance standard in a profession so much in the public eye yet so insufficiently rewarded financially is difficult for many educators.

Lack of Mentoring for High-Achieving Teachers

Another controversy concerning mentoring might involve the paucity of high-potential mentorship. A high-potential mentorship would be one in which a teacher already recognized by administrators as a superior educator would be mentored in order to attain an administrative leadership role or teacher-mentoring program director role. Given the limited time and resources in many public schools for coping with new teachers in need of mentoring, it seems counterintuitive to direct mentoring time for high-achieving teachers. If superior teachers are not mentored, they might suffer from acute isolation from their peers and leave the profession as a consequence.

One of the most successful examples of giving special treatment to outstanding teachers is the "Exemplary Teachers Initiative" sponsored by the Rodel Charitable Foundation in Arizona. The Foundation gives substantial cash rewards to public school teachers in high-poverty areas who have been identified by their administrators as outstanding educators so they can mentor new teachers working in their same area.

Terms & Concepts

Community Orientation: This refers to the process of familiarizing a new or transferred teacher to the social, economic, and educational values dominant in the teacher's community. This was a concept emphasized by John Dewey and his followers in the "Progressive Education" movement as a way to integrate school with the rest of the community.

Confidentiality: A condition of consistent and respectful privacy that should be offered to mentees in a teacher mentoring program as a way to assure honesty and directness of face-to-face communication in their communication with mentors.

Curricular Differentiation: Tailoring the demands of a standardized curriculum to best suit the needs of individual students with various learning styles.

Exit Strategy: A plan to permit an orderly and definite cessation of a teaching mentoring relationship.

Generativity: A term used by the psychologist Erik Erikson to signify the desire of an individual to leave a lasting positive influence on the world so that they will be remembered.

High Potential Mentorship: Mentoring to enhance the performance of teachers already functioning well above the average for their school.

Induction: A term currently used as a synonym for "teaching mentoring" in educational literature that was once used in the literature to indicate mentoring plus other forms of teacher training.

Mentoring Culture: The dominant atmosphere and attitude within a school that supports or inhibits teach mentoring relationships.

Mentoring Stance: A term referring to one of the following styles of teaching mentoring: coaching, collaboration, or consulting.

Non-Judgmental Feedback: A valuable form of feedback about teaching performance that a mentor can offer since the removal of negative judgment enhances the likelihood of the mentee being receptive to such feedback.

Reflective Practitioner: A goal for new or experienced teachers where they constantly question their pedagogical approaches and critical understanding of the subject matter taught.

Self-Assessment: An act of summative, professional self-evaluation gained through a mentoring relationship along with lessons learned through reflective teaching practice on one's own.

Bibliography

Aderibigbe, S. (2013). Opportunities of the collaborative mentoring relationships between teachers and student teachers in the classroom: The views of teachers, student teachers and university tutors. Management in Education (Sage Publications, Ltd.), 27, 70-74. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86692872&site=ehost-live

Booher, A. & Taylor, M. (1999). Byte-sized technology sessions: Teachers training teachers. Book Report, 18 , 46. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=3052579&site=ehost-live

Campbell, M. R. & Brummett, V. (2007). Mentoring preservice teachers for development and growth of professional knowledge. Music Educators Journal, 93 , 50-55. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=23546720&site=ehost-live

Davis, G. & Metzger, M. (2006). Teachers mentoring teachers. Edge: The Latest Information for the Education Practitioner, 1 , 3-19. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=19960710&site=ehost-live

Erikson, E. (1994) Identity and the life cycle. NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Hudson, P. (2013). Mentoring as professional development: ‘Growth for both’ mentor and mentee. Professional Development in Education, 39, 771-783. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=90503486&site=ehost-live

Jones, M. S. & Pauley, F. W. (2003). Mentoring beginning public school teachers. Adult Learning, 14 , 23-25. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=17481877&site=ehost-live

Lindgren, U. (2005). Experiences of beginning teachers in a school-based mentoring program in Sweden. Educational Studies, 31 , 251-263. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from ESBCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=17742618&site=ehost-live

Lipton, L., Wellman, B., & Humbard, C. (2003). Mentoring matters: A practical guide to learning-focused relationships. Sherman, CT: MiraVia LLC Publishers.

Lopez, A. E. (2013). Collaborative mentorship: A mentoring approach to support and sustain teachers for equity and diversity. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 21, 292-311. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=91791641&site=ehost-live

Norman, D. & Ganser, T. (2004). A humanistic approach to new teacher mentoring: A counseling perspective. Journal of Humanistic Counseling Education & Development, 43 , 129-140. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=10579237&site=ehost-live

Pitton, D. E. (2006), Mentoring novice teachers: Fostering a dialogue process . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Reps, P. & Senzaki, N. (1957). Zen flesh, Zen bones . Boston, MA: Shambhala Books.

Rowley, J. B. (2006). Becoming a high performance mentor. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Shulman, J. H. & Sato, M. (Eds.). (2006). Mentoring teachers toward excellence: Supporting and developing highly qualified teachers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Strong, M. (2005). Teacher induction, mentoring, and retention: A summary of the research. New Educator, 1 , 181-198. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=15085239&site=ehost-live

Udelhofen, S. K. & Larson, K. (2003). The mentoring year: A step-by-step program for professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Suggested Reading

Conway, C. M., ed. (2003). Great beginnings for music teachers: Mentoring and supporting new teachers . Reston, VA: MENC: The National Association for Music Education.

Futrell, M. H. (1988). Selecting and compensating mentor-teachers: A win-win scenario. Theory Into Practice, 27 , 223-226. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=5200380&site=ehost-live

Green, M. Y. (2000). New teachers find a friend. NEA Today, 19 , 26-27. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=3524108&site=ehost-live

Tellez, K. (1992). Mentors by choice, not design: help-seeking by beginning teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 43 , 214-221.

Zachary, L. J. (2000). The mentor's guide: Facilitating effective learning relationships. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Zeichner, K. M. & Liston, D. P. (1996). Reflective teaching . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.