Thank you for supporting our post-graduate trainees in your setting. 

Your commitment to working with us to secure the future of teacher quality and sufficiency in our area is very much appreciated.

We recognise the pivotal role a mentor plays in both trainee progress and development, a comprehensive development programme is provided for all mentors of Staffordshire University trainees. 

This programme is directly linked to the National Standards for ITE Mentors (DfE, 2016) and has been designed to help mentors to further develop their own practice, in order provide the best possible support for our trainees.

Here at Staffordshire University, we have developed a programme to further upskill and support our mentors so that they can have the best impact on our trainees and ultimately on our pupils. 

We offer the opportunity for mentors to undertake the Advanced Mentor Development Programme. 

This self-directed programme using the Thinkific platform is suitable for all mentors and is not dependent on level of experience; it has been designed to help mentors grow and apply their skills in a school/college-based context.

Participants who have successfully completed the programme will be awarded a certificate by the university and will be encouraged to share their learning and their journey through their mentor handbook with other mentors across the partnership.

Mentor Standards

“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.

See Mentor Standards link below:

The 4 C's Principles

All ITE at the Institute of Education at Staffordshire University is underpinned by four key principles, known as the 4C’s. Each ‘C’ represents a different aspect of effective teaching and collectively, they exemplify the collective philosophy and vision for ITE within the Institute of Education.

The 4C's form the underlying structure of our ITE provision which are meaningfully integrated into all aspects of the training programme. 

The 4C's are linked to the mentor standards to enable our mentors to reflect upon their own practice and engagement through Staffordshire Universities Mentor development CPD programme.

This helps to shape both our curriculum intention and implementation, demonstrating how our curriculum is not only ambitious but also rooted in educational beliefs and values underpinned by the 4C's.

There will be a range of training sessions throughout the year to comply with the DfE's new accreditation requirements. Please keep an eye on your email communication for further details.

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.

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 (ITTECF, DfE, 2024) and the Institute of Educations (IOE) 4 C’s principles which underpin all provision.

Our Secondary ITE curriculum embraces the core themes of the ITTECF (DfE, 2024) 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 ITTECF (DfE, 2024) 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 Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework (DfE, 2024). 

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

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). The new ITTECF (DfE, 2024) combines both the CCF and ECF. The ITTECF will be an official requirement from 2025 but we have moved across to this framework for the year 2024-2025.

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 ITTECF (DfE, 2024) 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 ITTECF establishes a three-year structured package of support for future teachers and reflects the minimum entitlement for teacher trainees and places a duty on providers of ITE and their partner schools to meet this entitlement.

ITT Core Content Framework (CCF) Exemplification Resources

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 ITTECF for discussion using the Lesson Observation and target setting form and other forms of evidence from the trainees teaching folder.

This will promote:

•  a consistent focus on pupils’ progress.

• the cross-referencing of trainees’ progress against the ITTECF 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 (Teaching observation and Target Setting Form)

Lesson Observation – A Coaching Approach

At Staffordshire University, we view lesson observations as a developmental process, with feedback being used by our students to create self-reflective and self-directed trainee. This links directly to being Critically Reflective one of our 4C's.

Lesson observation in itself does not improve teaching and learning, it is the quality of the feedback and how it is used that are the fundamental factors needed to enable trainees to progress.

As a university, we have moved away from awarding a grade at the end of every lesson observation. Providing summative snapshot judgements has been shown to be an inaccurate way of assessing the quality of teaching. Additionally, a grade by itself does little to help a student identify what they need to do to improve their practice.

As educators we know that the knowledge, skills and behaviours associated with good quality teaching take time to develop. Many studies suggest that a collaborative and collegiate, dialogical approach to lesson observation is an effective way of enabling practitioners to take ownership of their own learning and development. 

Praise-give positive feedback on what is going well and how this is having an impact on teaching and pupil progress

Probe-looking at an area for development (clear teaching target) within the teaching, use the evidence and ask more questions (See questions and prompts section to support trainee reflection and review linked to the CCF).

Set specific actions, a plan to implement the teaching target

Implement through deliberate practice- Take time to rehearse each of the steps, overcoming initial challenges and increasing fluency, try scripting and modelling what you want to see with your trainee in a low stakes environment for the trainee to see the changes needed.

Review- weekly mentor meeting, supporting the trainee to reflect and develop professional conversations.

Framework for Mentor feedback

A series of questions/prompts to help guide the professional conversations with your trainee have been

created and can be found in your mentor handbooks along with a feedback framework to support a consistent approach to each lesson observation feedback session.

The prompts can be used during the feedback session after a lesson observation, enabling a more educative

mentoring and instructional coaching approach to giving feedback to ensure the progress of your trainee.

We want to move away from mentors asking trainees this question following a taught lesson;

   ' So how do you think it went then?'

This framework is designed to support mentor feedback to develop trainees' reflection and professional skills following a taught lesson, using an instructional coaching model approach to feedback.

We believe this combination of educative mentoring and instructional coaching approach will enable trainees to reflect more deeply upon their own teaching practice and develop trainees’ professional conversations and enable them to be critically reflective, confident researchers, community centered and are able to connect the curriculum.

The exemplification resources have been created from a variety of sources, including previous mentor network meetings, and curated by the Secondary Mentors Advisory Group. 

It follows a cycle of reflection that will enable mentors to consistently apply feedback, through questioning that will enable trainees to make progress with their teaching practice through mentors utilizing a combination of instructional coaching and educative mentoring approaches.

You can find a copy of these frameworks and questions/prompts resources within your mentor handbook and a link can be found within the Mentor Resources section of the website.

Stoke and Staffordshire Teacher Education Collective

A collective geared towards supporting mentors across the region  to share ideas and enrich their pedagogy and practice and collaborate across the region of Stoke on Trent and Staffordshire via the Stoke and Staffordshire Teacher Education Collective  https://sstec.online/