Mentor Teachers' Perspectives on the Practice of Mentoring

• In Event: Innovations in Coaching and Mentoring: Investigating the Practices of Instructional Coaches and Teacher Mentors

Abstract

Objectives & purposes
Existing literature on the practice of instructional coaches and mentor teachers focuses almost exclusively on activity that occurs outside of instructional time (e.g., co-planning and debrief conversations) (Hoffman et al., 2015). Notable exceptions do exist, including Schwille’s (2008) attention to the practice of “stepping in.” Interested in understanding whether mentor teachers also conceptualize the practice of mentoring as an activity that occurs outside of instruction, our study explores where, when, and how mentoring practice takes place, according to mentor teachers themselves.
Theoretical framework
Our investigation into the practice of mentoring is guided both by sociocultural theory (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez, & Angelillo, 2003) and literature on learning from experience (Dewey, 1904/1965). Taken together, this literature suggests that carefully designed opportunities to practice (Ericcson, 2002), in-the-moment feedback (Schön, 1987), and explicit models and representations (Grossman et al., 2009) play important roles in learning to enact complex professional practices. Given the importance of guided practice in professional learning, it is interesting that the literature on mentoring focuses almost exclusively on activity that occurs outside of the central activity of teaching: interacting with K-12 students.
Methods & Data
To that end our qualitative study was designed to examine two research questions:
1. How do mentor teachers conceptualize the practice of mentoring?
2. What do mentor teachers understand as opportunities and constraints associated with their current mentoring practices?
Participants include 40 mentor teachers across four institutions. Each participant responded to a survey, participated in an interview, and engaged in a structured activity in which they responded to a set of researcher-created vignettes about mentoring. Vignettes included mentoring strategies such as co-planning or observing and providing feedback as well as mentoring strategies that take place in-the-moment of teaching, such as narrating, modeling, offering in-the-moment feedback, and stepping-in. We asked mentors to categorize vignettes by the likelihood that they would do something similar to what was described in the vignette; and the degree to which they felt such practice would (or would not) benefit new teachers. Once mentors sorted the vignettes, we asked them to discuss their sorting rationale.
Results
Emergent findings indicate that mentor teachers typically report that they do not engage in mentoring practices that occur during instructional time. While mentors provided a variety of reasons for why they do not engage in in-the-moment mentoring, some reasons were shared across almost all mentors including a desire not to undercut novices’ authority in the eyes of K-12 students.
Significance
While novices consider the guidance of the mentor teacher as one of the most important features of their preparation (Duffield, 2006), very little is known about the practices of mentor teachers. This study helps illustrate the range of practices that mentors typically engage in, as well as helps to provide insights into the reasons why mentors may or may not pick up more interactive practices.

Authors

• Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Brandeis University

• Karen M. Hammerness, American Museum of Natural History

• Kavita Kapadia Matsko, Northwestern University

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• Jamie Wallace, American Museum of Natural History