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Mentoring is a critical topic in education today and a favored
strategy in U.S. policy initiatives focused on teacher induction.
Besides creating new career opportunities for veteran teachers,
assigning mentors to work with beginning teachers represents an
improvement over the abrupt and unassisted entry into teaching that
characterizes the experience of many novices. Still, the promise of
mentoring goes beyond helping novices survive their first year of
teaching. If mentoring is to function as a strategy of reform, it
must be linked to a vision of good teaching, guided by an
understanding of teacher learning, and supported by a professional
culture that favors collaboration and inquiry. This Digest examines
the spread of mentoring in the United States, obstacles to realizing
the potential of mentoring as a vehicle of reform, needed research,
and selected issues of policy and practice.
THE SPREAD OF MENTORING
The mentoring idea has also been extended to the preservice level.
Proposals for the redesign of teacher preparation (e.g., Holmes
Group, l990) call for teacher candidates to work closely with
experienced teachers in internship sites and restructured school
settings such as professional development schools. The hope is that
experienced teachers will serve as mentors and models, helping
novices learn new pedagogies and socializing them to new
professional norms. This vision of mentoring depends on school-
university partnerships that support professional development for
both mentors and teacher candidates.
A CAUTIONARY NOTE
These findings should not surprise us. Mentor teachers have little
experience with the core activities of mentoring -- observing and
discussing teaching with colleagues. Most teachers work alone, in
the privacy of their classroom, protected by norms of autonomy and
noninterference. Nor does the culture of teaching encourage
distinctions among teachers based on expertise. The persistence of
privacy, the lack of opportunities to observe and discuss each
other's practice, and the tendency to treat all teachers as equal
limits what mentors can do, even when working with novices (Little,
l990).
In addition, few mentor teachers practice the kind of conceptually
oriented, learner-centered teaching advocated by reformers (Cohen,
McLaughlin, & Talbert, l993). If we want mentors to help novices
learn the ways of thinking and acting associated with new kinds of
teaching, then we have to place them with mentors who are already
reformers in their schools and classrooms (Cochran-Smith, l991), or
develop collaborative contexts where mentors and novices can
explore new approaches together.
NEEDED RESEARCH
Since l990, some researchers have begun to fill in those gaps. In
one comparison of two beginning teacher programs, researchers
documented striking differences in the way mentor teachers
conceived of and carried out their work with novices. They linked
these differences in mentors perspectives and practices to
differences in role expectations, working conditions, program
orientations, and mentor preparation (Feiman-Nemser & Parker,
l993). In a reform-oriented preservice program, Cochran-Smith
(l991) studied the conversations of student teachers and
experienced teachers in weekly, school-site meetings at four urban
schools. She shows how these conversations, occasions for group
mentoring, expose novices to broad themes of reform through
discussions of highly contextualized problems of practice. Between
l991-95, researchers at the National Center for Research on Teacher
Learning at Michigan State carried out a comparative, cross-
cultural study of mentoring in selected sites in the United States,
England, and China. The study sought insights about learning to
teach, mentoring practices, and the conditions that enable novices
and mentors to work together in productive ways. Preliminary
findings underscore the influence of mentors beliefs about learning
to teach, the challenges of learning to teach for understanding,
and the impact of different contextual factors (e.g., school
culture, national policies) on mentors practice and novices
learning.
To inform mentoring policy and practice, we need more direct studies
of mentoring and its affects on teaching and teacher retention,
especially in urban settings where turnover is high. We also need to
know more about how mentors learn to work with novices in productive
ways, what structures and resources enable that work, and how
mentoring fits into broader frameworks of professional development
and accountability.
THORNY ISSUES OF POLICY AND PRACTICE
A second issue is whether something as personal as a mentoring
relationship can be formalized in a program. Should mentors be
chosen or assigned? Skeptics might consider the possibility that
what a novice learns from a mentor depends as much on what they do
together as it does on the affective quality of their relationship
(Tharp & Gallimore, l988). Still, mentoring relationships are bound
to be unpredictable. Program developers may be wise to focus on
creating optimal conditions rather than trying to make optimal
matches (Tauer, l995).
A third issue is time, that is, time to mentor and time to learn to
mentor. Some programs hire retired teachers. Others release mentor
teachers from some or all of their classroom responsibilities.
Still others expect mentors to combine mentoring with full-time
teaching. Besides sending different messages about the purposes of
mentoring, these arrangements create different situations in which
mentors can learn and apply their skills. Most mentoring programs
provide some orientation or training. Common topics include
clinical supervision, research on effective teaching, beginning
teacher concerns, and theories of adult learning. Less common but
no less important are opportunities for mentors to analyze their
own beliefs about learning to teach and to articulate their
practical knowledge of teaching. While training usually occurs
before mentors take up their new responsibilities, mentors are more
likely to develop their practice as mentors if they also have
opportunities to discuss questions and problems that arise in the
course of their work with novices.
SUMMARY
Since the early l980s, when mentoring burst onto the educational
scene as part of a broad movement aimed at improving education,
policymakers and educational leaders have pinned high hopes on
mentoring as a vehicle for reforming teaching and teacher
education. Concerned about the rate of attrition during the first 3
years of teaching and aware of the problems faced by beginning
teachers, policymakers saw the logic of providing on-site support
and assistance to novices during their first year of teaching
(Little, l990). The scale of mentoring has increased rapidly, with
over 30 states mandating some form of mentored support for
beginning teachers.
Enthusiasm for mentoring has not been matched by clarity about the
purposes of mentoring. Nor have claims about mentoring been
subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny. The education community
understands that mentors have a positive affect on teacher
retention, but that leaves open the question of what mentors should
do, what they actually do, and what novices learn as a result. Just
as research on student teaching highlights the conservative
influence of cooperating teachers and school cultures on novices
practice, so some studies show that mentors promote conventional
norms and practices, thus limiting reform (e.g., Feiman-Nemser,
Parker, & Zeichner, l993).
Before l990, the literature on mentoring consisted mainly of program
descriptions, survey-based evaluations, definitions of mentoring,
and general discussions of mentors roles and responsibilities.
Researchers did not conceptualize mentors work in relation to
novices learning or study the practice of mentoring directly.
Reviewing the literature, Little (l990) found few comprehensive
studies well-informed by theory and designed to examine in depth the
context, content and consequences of mentoring (p. 297).
According to conventional wisdom, mentors should assist not assess
on the grounds that novices are more likely to share problems and
ask for help if mentors do not evaluate them. The issue is not so
straightforward. Some state-level programs use a team approach in
which mentor teachers fulfill the support function while others
(e.g., a principal or professor) judge the novice's performance for
purposes of employment or certification. Other programs give mentor
teachers a prominent role in these gatekeeping decisions on the
grounds of professionalism and accountability. Clearly different
ways of resolving the assistance vs. assessment issue involve
different costs and benefits for mentors and novices, for states
and districts, and for the profession of teaching.
By promoting observation and conversation about teaching, mentoring
can help teachers develop tools for continuous improvement. If
learning to teach in reform-minded ways is the focus of this joint
work, mentoring will also fulfill its promise as an instrument of
reform. Unfortunately budget shortfalls in the l990s may be leading
districts and states to eliminate mentoring programs before this
possibility is realized.
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