Mentoring Strategies

A helpful guide to understanding how best to support your mentee is provided by Furlong and Maynard (1995).  They propose that new teachers pass through five stages of development:

Early Idealism
This stage is often present before the new teacher enters the classroom for the first time.  The intending teacher may visualise themselves having an excellent relationship with their learners, being successful in enabling learning and establishing and maintaining a highly effective and enjoyable learning environment.  Those entering post compulsory education often justify their choice of career by saying that they want to work with learners who are highly motivated and want to learn.  In other words, they anticipate that there will be no classroom management issues present.

Personal survival
During the first few weeks in the classroom the new teacher can feel overwhelmed by the workload of preparing for teaching and selecting, adapting or creating resources (as well as meeting deadlines for written assignments for their teacher training course).  In addition, they often feel disappointed and possibly even out of their depth when they encounter behaviour management problems or apparent lack of interest or motivation to learn.

Seeing the difficulties
By now, the new teacher is becoming more confident and is beginning to see what they are doing well and what they need to do to improve.  They develop an appreciation of the challenges of the job and begin to work on strategies to overcome them.  One characteristic of this stage is that the mentee is likely to request feedback on how s/he is doing against the assessment requirements of their programme, and may also expect to know where s/he stands in relation to graded observations.

Hitting a plateau
Teachers who have reached this stage have generally found a way of teaching that works for them and are beginning to feel much more confident.  They may be reluctant to try out more new ideas and may believe they can teach in the same way from now on, regardless of the individual or collective needs of their learners.

Moving on
This is the stage at which the teacher can become a true reflective practitioner, someone who is able to cope with externally driven change and be truly focused on meeting their learners’ needs rather than on the delivery of syllabus content.  A key feature of such a teacher’s approach to their work would be a commitment to continuous improvement of their practice.

Furlong and Maynard point out that the mentor’s role changes to match the specific needs that may be present at each stage.  On the chart below, note down the strategies you might need to use to support your mentee and facilitate their progression to the next stage

Possible mentoring strategies:

                                            

·         Personal survival

·         Seeing the difficulties

·         Hitting a plateau

·         Moving on

                                              

In order to complete this task successfully make a response in each of the four boxes in which you suggest mentoring strategies and reflect on the likely needs of the mentee  (Draft your ideas in word first; when you are satisfied with what you have written, cut and paste them as comments.)