Mentor Teachers' Profiles on Their Motivations and Challenges: An Analysis of Four Mentoring Conversations

• In Event: Mentoring Conversations in Teacher Education: Roles, Relations, and Reciprocity

Abstract

Teacher mentoring is widely considered as the support given by expert teachers to student teachers during their practicum (Malderez, 2009, Hudson & Hudson, 2018). Orland-Barak (2014) states that mentoring in teaching revolves around three dimensions: identity which includes reasoning, beliefs and roles; behaviors and performance, and contexts which includes culture and discourse (e.g. conversations).

The present research work aims at describing four mentoring roles or profiles and content analyzing four mentoring conversations, one representative of each profile. The profiles resulted from a 62-item Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) completed by 1,950 mentors from nine countries: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, China, USA, Thailand, France and Hong Kong. The MPI (Author et al., 2012) is an online validated survey (www.mentoringprofile.com) for professional learning. The responses cluster into 14 scales that represent two categories: motivators and challenges. Drawing on the combination of four dimensions (self, interpersonal, other and systemic) four different mentoring profiles were determined: Partner; Advocate; Nurturer; and Facilitator. Four mentoring conversations (one for each profile) were video recorded, fully transcribed and content analyzed in order to look for mentoring strategies in each of them.

Main results indicate that Canada (134; 24.6%), New Zealand (65; 36.5%), Australia (126; 24.8%) and the USA (13; 31.7%) revealed a partner mentoring profile. China (65; 25.3%), Spain (67; 39.2%), Thailand (57; 33.5%) and Hong Kong (12; 40%) were more facilitators. Only France showed predominance in the advocate mentoring role (12; 61.3%). For the first group of countries the mentor teachers were concerned about their own role as mentors and their need to be constantly updated (learning oriented), whereas mentor teachers in the second group were more focused on the teacher candidates’ needs, and finding strategic ways to lead candidates towards a better adaptation to the school (institutional oriented).

Dissimilar numbers and distribution of mentoring skills (i.e., listening, giving information, giving advise) were found in mentoring profile conversations which helped to shape student-teachers’ learning in the practicum in different ways.

This research adds new insights by exploring mentoring profile types that are directly induced from empirical response patterns (based on survey responses). This approach might better adjust mentoring converstions according to the candidate teachers’ learning needs and interests (Grimmett et al. 2018).

Authors

• Juanjo Mena, Universidad de Salamanca

• Anthony Clarke, The University of British Columbia