Beginning Teachers' Professional Learning Through Teachers' Diaries With Mentors: The Dominican Republic Case

• In Event: Novice Teachers’ Experiences in High-Needs International Contexts

Abstract

In this study we would like to answer the following research questions: (a) What are beginning teachers’ concerns regarding their relationship with mentors? (b) Do classroom teaching is connected with the relations between beginning teachers and mentors?
Induction is a key stage in the professional development of beginning teachers. It has become urgent to attend to teachers’ needs in high needs schools (Cheryl, 2017). There have been many studies that have been carried out in relation to the subject of our study (Schmidt, Klusmann, Lüdtke, Möller, & Kunter, 2017). Mentoring is a process of an experienced teacher with specific training being in collaboration with one or more beginning teachers. The mentor activities with beginning teachers include planning, observing and mediation on education (Orland-Barak, 2014).
Participants were asked to write digital reflective diaries. The data of this study came from digital diaries that six beginning teachers wrote during their first year in an induction program in a high-need school in the Dominican Republic. Schools are in an area of special attention. High levels of crime and citizen insecurity characterize the near context. That influence life inside schools: high levels of absenteeism, violence, abuse, etc. These circumstances make the work of beginning teachers more complex and need to implement student retention strategies. Each beginning teachers, with mentors help, wrote around 38 pages of diaries, 67,500 words in total.
We analyzed the diaries content through two research questions, and findings are presented in the following:
a) It was not uncommon that beginning teachers questioned their abilities to teach. The mentors feel useful as support for teachers’ beginners, showing their experience and helping them to overcome the difficulties encountered at personal or classroom level. Mentors and learners establish good relations also in the personal field, which helps teachers to sustain in the profession who collaborate closely and collaboratively in the construction of joint practices.
b) Along with emotional support, mentors justify their activity in the accompaniment and support for the improvement of the teaching of beginning teachers’ classes. Several are the topics discussed in the newspapers such as problems, difficulties and concerns, training needs, interactive teaching and planning of it. For some beginning teachers, the teaching experience implies a true personal challenge. Among the concern of beginning teachers are two aspects related to the environment of classroom management: the discipline and motivation.
We can conclude that the challenges encountered by the beginning teachers include the discipline, motivation, lesson planning and technology use, which align with existing research findings (Vaillant & Marcelo, 2015). Mentors play an important role in the socialization of beginning teachers by providing emotional and professional supports (Schmidt, Klusmann, Lüdtke, Möller, & Kunter, 2017). The orientation that is perceived through their narratives is focus of what we might call “pedagogy of care” and “matriarchal orientation”. The mentor appears as a figure on the scale between the needs of beginning teachers’ staff and requirements of didactic orientation, emotional, psychological, support development of teaching skills, and administrative management.

Authors

• Carmen Gallego-Dominguez, University of Sevilla

• Paula Marcelo-Martinez, University of Sevilla