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Mentoring Programs

NFIE (2004). Creating a teacher mentoring program. http://www.nfie.org/publications/mentoring.htm

This paper from the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE) is a report of a teacher mentoring symposium. It draws upon the experiences of retired and practising teachers, administrators, higher education staff and teacher association leaders.

Metaphors for describing early teaching experiences include the following.

  • 'Taken to the base of Everest, dropped off and told to get to the top or quit. If you don't make it, your enthusiasm disappears, and you seek ways to avoid similar challenges in the future.'
  • 'Climbing a mountain that is cloud-covered. You can't see very far ahead and you don't know how high the mountain is.'
  • 'A journey for which there is no map to guide you.' (p. 2)

However, mentoring is:

  • 'a process that opens the doors to the school community and helps new faculty find the wisdom of all the teachers in the building'
  • 'going next door to that new person and saying, "What can I do for you?" ' (p. 2)

The authors point out that it's not only new teachers that can benefit from having a mentor.

  • The veteran third grade teacher who is suddenly reassigned to middle grades social studies may need the help of her colleagues every bit as much as the brand-new teacher. (p. 3)

Mentoring has been shown to keep talented teachers in teaching, and to improve the quality of teaching of both the protégés and the mentors.

The paper provides guidelines for discussing and planning mentoring programs including:

  • developing partnerships
  • appropriate placement of new teachers
  • finding time for mentoring
  • funding mentoring programs
  • managing issues of confidentiality
  • policies that assemble the nuts and bolts of programs
  • involving everyone with a stake in the outcomes of the mentoring program.

In addition, the paper provides an extensive list of characteristics that can serve as a guide for selecting mentors. Then there is the need to effectively match protégés with mentors, especially as the pool of experienced teachers becomes proportionally smaller and demands upon experienced teachers flow in from many different areas. Rather than one-to-one mentoring, one solution is to attach a protégé to several different mentors with different areas of specialisation.

The quality of mentoring programs can be measured by the quality of classroom learning. Evaluation involves keeping documentation and statistics, peer review and personal accountability. Quality can also be measured by the working life of the protégé (eg, whether job satisfaction and retention are improved).

The paper provides a number of questions for further discussion and reflection in the three areas.

  • What will be the key components of our mentoring program?
  • What will be the key issues to consider for mentors?
  • What will be the key issues to consider for protégés?

Further reading can be found at Mentoring