Mapping Instructional and Emotional Mentoring Skills That Unlock the Learning of the Teaching Profession in Spain

• In Event: 47.080 - The Value of Mentoring to Improve Teaching Practices: International Perspectives

Abstract

Understanding how teachers learn their profession at the workplace is especially relevant because school practice challenges conceptions and beliefs of practice. Mentoring is considered a central activity that offers professional guidance to accurately perform teaching activities but also endorse the management of emotions by co-regulating both positive and negative school experiences. Mentoring in Spain is essentially steered by Teacher Education programs belonging to public and private universities that offer primary and secondary schools ways of assessing the student teachers’ performance during the practicum. The mentoring models vary across universities with no unified national indicators.

In this paper, our aim is to describe how mentors’ supervising activity promotes both instructional and emotional support to student teachers in the practicum setting.

Mentoring teacher support is conceptualized according to two models: the MERID model (Henissen et al., 2008) to scrutinize instructional support -learning oriented- which is based upon directive and non-directive skills; and the Emotional Intelligence Mentoring model –personal oriented- (EIM; Opengart & Bierema, 2015) consisting of four dimensions: (a) emotive mentoring (e.g., emotional gauging); (b) non-productive mentoring (e.g., misperception, etc.); (c) productive mentoring (e.g., trust building, role modeling, etc.) and (d) relational mentoring (e.g., protégé development).

Two dyads of school mentors and student teachers (23 and 24 year-old) of a degree program in teacher education at the University of Salamanca, Spain, participated in this study (year 2017-2017). Their teaching lessons were video-recorded and transcribed. Analysis were conducted by using NVIVO 12.1

Our results show that mentors used instructional skills and emotional skills on a similar extent (83 discourse nodes, 46% for the first; and 97 nodes, 54% for the second). The directive instructional skills mostly used were: giving advise (8; 4.4 %); giving information (27; 15%); and giving opinion (44; 24.4%). The non-directive skills: listening (9; 5%); questioning (1; 0.5%); and summarizing (6; 3.3%). The emotional support showed that productive mentoring represented 16.6% of the conversation by using accurate emotional gauging, perception understanding or emotion management. Emotive mentoring, such as recognizing emotions or misperceptions represented 14.4%. Relational mentoring (e.g., emotional errors or mentoring miscalculations, etc.) also represented one third of the dialogues (27; 15%).

This study demonstrates how mentors teach the profession (instructional side) mostly by directly assessing what the student teachers did and not by letting them to be more active in the conversations. On the other hand, the mentors devoted half of their time to ST personal support (emotional side) indicating its importance to trigger teaching learning. The limitation of our analysis is that teachers’ emotional skills are disclosed under discourse patterns (non-verbal aspects are considered). The importance of this work highlights that trust and support enhance teamwork among the mentor and mentee with, in the end, improves school dynamics and the sense of belonging to the profession.

Authors

• Juanjo Mena, Universidad de Salamanca

• Victoria De Miguel, Universidad de Salamanca

• Marta Martín del Pozo, Universidad de Salamanca

• Maria-Luisa García Rodríguez, Universidad de Salamanca