“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)

The following framework is designed to recognise sustained excellence and provide professional recognition and status to mentors within the Staffordshire University Initial Teacher Education Partnership that:

1. Exemplify the 2016 Mentor Standards

2. Make significant contributions to the ITE Partnership

• • • • Standard 1 - Personal qualities: Establish trusting relationships, modelling high standards of practice,  and empathising with the challenges a trainee faces.

      • Standard 2 – Teaching: Support trainees to develop their teaching practice to set high expectations and to meet the needs of all learners.

      • Standard 3 – Professionalism: Induct the trainee into professional norms and values, helping them to understand the importance of the role and responsibilities of teachers in society.

      • Standard 4 – Self-development and working in partnership: Continue to develop their own professional   knowledge, skills and understanding and invest time in developing a good working relationship within relevant ITE partnerships.Independent report template - annex 3_NG Final (publishing.service.gov.uk) 

See Mentor Standards links below:

Mentor Development - CPD programme

All mentors will be given a mentor handbook which has a section for reviews of own mentoring practice in response to both the 4C's and the mentor standards. 

Reflective practice is strongly recommended and mentors are encouraged to undertake regular self-reviews, the findings of which can be used to identify the next steps they will take to develop their own practice and continued professional development.

We are very pleased to invite you to attend our free online Mentor development CPD sessions.

You will be sent details about how to join the online TEAMS meeting shortly before the training session and will have calendar invites sent to your email used within your school or setting.

Mentor development CPD sessions are scheduled as shown via the document below.

Our aim and philosophy for Mentor Development

It is our intent to provide all trainee teachers with a broad, balanced, and challenging curriculum, which is sufficiently flexible to meet personal, local, or national priorities and needs.  The quality of  curriculum can be judged on how effectively we provide our trainees with opportunity to develop in terms of the ITE Core Content Framework (CCF) and the Institute of Educations (IOE) 4 C’s principles which underpin all provision.

Our Primary ITE curriculum embraces the core themes of the ITT CCF above within our own model which we have developed with partners.

This model forms the underlying structure of our provision where meaningful and fully integrated aspects of the training programme enables our trainees to understand how we use a spiral approach to our curriculum, returning to and building on themes. 

We use this framework to construct our programme in both subject specific teaching sessions led by highly experienced subject specialists and our lecture programme.

The aim of the Staffordshire University ITE Partnership is 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 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

   Feiman-Nemser, S. (1998). Teachers as Teacher Educators. European Journal of Teacher Education, 21(1), 63-71.

Mackintosh, J. (2020) Educative mentoring, LINK, Volume 5, Issue 1: https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-4,-issue-1/educative-mentoring

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 practice. Novice teachers should be given opportunities to practice 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 practiced

    • Design the practice – 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  practice in the classroom under the supervision of a skilled and experienced teacher

    • Give feedback and over time increases the complexity of practice

Knight, J. (2016) Teach to win: seven success factors for instructional coaching programs. Education digest, 81 (5): 27-32.

Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D and Hogan, D (2018) ‘The effect of teacher coaching on instruction and achievement: a meta-analysis of the casual evidence’. Review of Educational Research, 88(4): 547-588

Developing and supporting your Trainee Teacher and applying the Core Content Framework (CCF).

The Core Content Framework (CCF) was first introduced in 2019, with all ITE providers designing their curriculum to ensure that the CCF is the minimum entitlement delivered to all trainee teachers from 2020. This framework builds on and replaces the Framework of Core Content for Initial Teacher Training (2016).

This framework draws on the best available evidence ensuring that providers design their curricula to support trainee development in 5 core areas – behaviour management, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours.

The Core Content Framework (CCF) mirrors the Early Career framework (ECF) and sets out two types of content ‘learn that’ and ‘learn how to’ ensuring all entrants into the profession have access to a curriculum which is underpinned by the evidence of what makes great teaching.

It is designed in the knowledge that the quality of teaching is the most important factor in improving outcomes for pupils. The ITT Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework together establish a three-year structured package of support for future teachers.

The ITT Core Content Framework (DfE, 2019) which reflects the minimum entitlement for teacher trainees and places a duty on providers of ITE and their partner schools to meet this entitlement.

Weekly Mentor Review Meeting

The weekly mentor meetings with your trainee draws upon evidence from across the week, the trainee presents evidence of pupil progress linked to the CCF for discussion using the Weekly Teaching Observation (WTO) form.  This will allow for the necessary professional dialogue to allow our students to make strong progress in their development as a teacher through the subsequent setting of targets to help to move practice on. 

This will promote:

•  a consistent focus on pupils’ progress.

• the cross-referencing of trainees’ progress against the Core Content Framework (CCF) and to the impact of their teaching on pupils’ progress and learning over time.

• the regular review of teaching targets in the light of the pupils’ progress and next steps identified and recorded in the Weekly Teaching Observation form.