Mentoring, Teacher Preparation Pedagogy

Purposes of Mentoring

Research by Jian Wang and Sandra Odell, as well as by Betty Achinstein and Steven Athanases, summarize a series of mentoring frameworks that identify different purposes for mentoring. A managerial frame focuses on mentoring about organizational/institutional procedures, norms, and rules of the profession and the organization of the work such as classroom management, school rules, or district policies. A humanist frame highlights helping novices through emotional adjustment and self-image support in a stressful period of immersion in the life of schools and students. A cognitive-apprentice frame features novices as apprentices in need of expert guidance to learn a body of knowledge of practice and to participate in the professional community of reflective practitioners. A political-critical frame highlights how novices can become agents of change, pose problems of teaching, uncover assumptions, and reconstruct practice. In this framework, mentors work with novices to challenge current classroom and school [Page 1465]arrangements for more equitable schooling. While all four frameworks serve important purposes in supporting new teachers and are embedded in many mentoring efforts, researchers highlight how the fourth frame—political-critical—focuses explicitly on educational equity. The political-critical frame envisions mentoring as an opportunity to help novices reflect critically on their own practices and schooling in order to foster equitable learning opportunities for all children. It also envisions reform-minded teachers and mentors collaboratively engaged in a change process that impacts students, themselves, classrooms, organizations, and the profession. Some research has noted that this frame is less often fully developed in mentoring work.

Mentoring Clients

Who benefits from teacher mentoring is an important focus for research. While literature on mentoring shows that mentors focus on the needs of novice teachers, it also highlights how mentors who are focused on diversity and equity also maintain that underserved and underperforming youth are cast as the primary clients of mentoring. In this approach, mentors may foreground the learning needs of low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse youth who have historically been underserved. Preparation in teaching for equity can include student teaching supervisors as equity mentors, placements with cooperating teachers who model teaching for equity, and ongoing cohort discussions of equity teaching supported by university-based mentors. In this way, mentors may serve to support novices to move beyond a teacher-centered focus to view students as individual learners with varied needs, addressing the needs of low-income, cultural/linguistic nondominant youth, and those historically underserved in classrooms.

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