Mentoring rationale

“Mentors have a crucial role to play in supporting teacher trainees during their ITE through to successful teacher accreditation and beyond the early stages of their careers. An effective mentor sets high expectations for achievement, models high-quality teaching, and acts as an ambassador for the profession.” (DfE 2016)

Rationale

Our professional learning programme for mentors provides a clear framework for development and is built on the evidence base for high quality professional learning https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/cedir/ and is informed by research on educative mentoring: Bradbury, L. U. (2010), Feiman-Nemser, S. (1983, 1998 and 2001), Hudson, P. (2013), Jones, R., & Brown, D. (2011), Mackintosh, J. (2020) and Trevethan, H., & Sandretto, S. (2017).

High quality programmes are characterised by being consistent, coherent, and cumulative with opportunities for novice teachers to work with teachers and trained experts to learn, adopt, and adapt new teaching practices in a context that provides critical feedback, support, and mutual exploration of evidence informed practice.

Our dialogic approach is designed to enable collaborative working and a shared focus on subject knowledge and pedagogy. Our programme includes instructional coaching principles and approaches (Knight, J (2022) to facilitate co-analysis, disciplined enquiry, deliberate practice, focused feedback, and support. 

Our training programme, fully aligned to the CCF and ECF, enables mentors to engage with the evidence base and underpinning research for these approaches articulated by Knight, J. &  van Nieuwerburgh, C. (2012) and Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D and Hogan, D (2018),  to drive the improvement of professional practice in relation to criteria that develop both the individual and the wider community of educators.

Our aim and philosophy for mentor development

Our aim is thus to foster and support a mentoring and coaching culture in which all participants can reflect on and develop their practice. This might best be achieved through a combination of ‘educative mentoring’ and ‘instructional coaching’ models.

Educative Mentoring

Traditionally, mentoring has been seen as a process for handing down knowledge, maintaining culture, and supporting talent. In this context, learning is viewed as a means of transmitting knowledge from an older, experienced member of an organisation to a less experienced colleague (trainee). Therefore, mentoring enacted in a traditional way within ITE sees a teacher-mentor adopting and maintaining the role of ‘expert’ to impart their knowledge, information and support and the trainee-teacher (novice) as the recipient of this knowledge. As a result, the mentoring relationship becomes one about the reproduction and maintenance of current knowledge and a ‘what works here’ attitude towards learning about teaching which can restrict opportunities for the learning of the trainee-teacher and the teacher-mentor.

A different approach would be to see the learning and developmental process as collaborative, a mutual exploration in which co-learning becomes possible. Mentors and trainees work together to construct (and sometimes re-construct) their understanding of teaching and learning. This is a process which has become known as ‘educative mentoring’ (Sharon Feiman-Nemser,1998, 2001b).

Educative mentoring has the following key elements:

Mentoring as ‘inquiry’:

The mentor-trainee dialogue is seen as a process of inquiry where teachers learn in and from their teaching. Different approaches to practice are trialled and disciplined talk between mentors and trainees is used to focus on a particular aspect of practice.

Mentoring as collaborative work:

Mentors and trainees are co-learners; trainees learn from doing and talking about their work with their mentor, and the expertise of both partners is used to develop practice.

Mentoring as ‘thinking aloud’: articulation of the reasoning behind teaching:

Mentors make visible and explicit what is usually invisible and implicit by articulating thoughts, questions, and wonderings during co-planning and by reviewing their own teaching, making their reflections on their own teaching visible.

Mentoring as a practice that foregrounds pupil learning:

Lesson observations and debriefing are focused on pupil learning needs and goals. Pupil thinking and work is used as a source of knowledge about teaching and learning.

Mentoring as a ‘bi-focal’ practice addressing the long-term goals of trainees as well as short-term concerns:

Mentors try to work out what trainees need to learn and use a combination of showing and telling, asking, and listening to pinpoint problems of practice.

Educative mentoring provides trainees with:

• a space/opportunity to reflect deeply

• a collaborative community where ideas can be shared and developed

• a structure for learning and an opportunity to hear from a diverse range of individual experts

• a variety of activities to engage with, including case studies and research

Adapted from Mackintosh, J. (2020)

Instructional Coaching

Instructional coaching has been a focus more lately as it has shown promising results in schools, with a recent meta-analysis (Kraft et al, 2018) revealing positive effects of coaching on instructional practice. Instructional coaching supports the ECF as it is based on the notion of a novice teacher working with another teacher trained expert to help them learn, adopt new teaching practices, and provide feedback, while combining teaching and content expertise. There is no standard coaching model for this approach, however Jim Knight (2016) has been a pioneer in the evolution of instructional coaching in education, widely documented work in schools in charting the move away from the executive/life coaching model to partnering teachers to incorporate research-based instructional practices into their teaching.  

Essentially, instructional coaching is a process through which teachers are provided with frequent, one-to-one feedback, along with the opportunity to practise. Novice teachers should be given opportunities to practise in a low-stakes environment, for example outside the classroom (i.e., not in front of pupils), in team-teaching and supported scenarios, but also live in the classroom.

Obviously, as they develop, they will assume more and more responsibility for their teaching. Throughout their school placement, however, the target-setting practice should be the same.

Trainees should be given precise targets and ‘bite-size’ actions to complete. They should be given opportunities for deliberate practice.

This is the model favoured by the Core Content Framework and Early Career Framework. In essence, a trainee’s practice should always be informed and deliberate and related to target performance.

The stages of instructional coaching can be broken down as follows:

• Identify and clearly define the target performance desired – this will obviously be determined by the trainee’s current stage of training and development

• Identify the biggest gap between the target performance and where the trainee is now

• Break this down into granular component parts which can be practised

• Design the practise – what exactly is the trainee going to work on?

• Facilitate the practice in controlled conditions, i.e., model the practice and give trainees opportunities to practise in the classroom under the supervision of a skilled and experienced teacher

• Give feedback and over time increases the complexity of practice