“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
Proverbs 27:17
I’m a little rusty with my metallurgy but I can see the point of this Biblical proverb. There is benefit in the friction created between two iron blades. It makes them more effective for the purpose of cutting.
Mentoring in schools can add value. It can sharpen learning and practice. Mentoring can provide a sounding board for dialogue that enables teachers to develop. However, it can be a blunt tool if poorly implemented.
The rise of mentoring
Mentoring has gained prominence in schools thanks to the provisions of the Early Career Framework (DfE, 2019). This has benefits, but it is important to remember that effective mentoring is a concentrated process rooted in both formal and informal modes of communication.
Experienced mentors will draw on a range of strategies to offer advice, instruction, and developmental opportunities for mentees.
Problems can occur if mentors only adopt mechanical approaches to instruction in place of building trust with mentees and allowing for natural curiosity to grow. Mentors who are overly strict and critical of novices are likely to corrode the mentoring relationship (Hudson, 2013).
Mentors require responsiveness to the emerging needs of mentees. Fostering curiosity should be an important focus in a mentoring relationship. Yet, when individuals feel that they are more knowledgeable in a subject than others, they are less likely to be open-minded or facilitate curiosity in others (Kruger & Dunning, 1999; McIntosh et al, 2019).
An approach I adopt to help practise curiosity in mentoring is to routinely encourage mentees to bring “curious problems” for discussion. These might be perceived or persistent problems identified through their own classroom practice or in other aspects of school life (e.g. school systems and processes).
So, how can we use our mentoring to address common problems?
1, “Start off firm and cold with them, you are not here to be liked!”
This was a problem one mentee brought from a previous placement school. They were finding it difficult to implement because they wanted to be more relational with pupils. Of course, the problem for me was that they had been given this common misconception to begin with.
When debunking misconceptions, it is important to support mentees in unpacking the thinking that might sit behind the issue. This can help mentee and mentor to consider any positive intent or grains of truth that might exist too.
Behind this problem is an arguably well-intentioned notion that assertive routines and high expectations of pupils are the best starting point for teachers. Yet, the research indicates links between supportive and warm teacher-student relationships and effective teaching (Hattie, 2009; Zee & Koomen, 2019).
It is useful to introduce research and thinking into mentoring discussions that can allow for orthodoxies or misconceptions to be addressed. This can challenge your own assumptions as a mentor and it demonstrates the value of curiosity.
On this problem, I tasked a mentee with finding research that supports the benefits of demonstrating positivity in a classroom environment.
The mentee found a study from Chen et al (2018). Researchers at Stanford University studied more than 200 children and discovered that being positive helped to improve their ability to answer mathematical problems and use problem-solving.
It certainly challenged the mentee’s previously held notion that refraining from a smile in your first year of teaching was a good or realistic strategy.
2, “Only focus on your own classroom, you’re too busy for anything else.”
This was a problem that a group of mentees shared with me. It came from a mixture of comments offered to them over time from colleagues in a staffroom. Well-intentioned perhaps, but it had led to several mentees thinking that your first few years as a trainee were purely about surviving in your own classroom.
As a mentor, I actively encourage mentees to spend time in other areas of school life outside of their classroom or subject/phase. This can help foster further curiosity for mentees and, if trainees are given adequate time, it can help them in understanding other roles in schools.
Research has shown the benefits of novices shadowing others in organisations. It provides opportunities for self-development, sharing experiences with new colleagues, and it creates space for critical reflection to take place in teams (see for example, Tsai et al, 2022).
It is important to build time and capacity for mentees to do this. I have used the following approaches as a means of supporting mentees in shadowing others:
- Spending time with a SENCO to understand systems, processes, and the importance of routines for children with SEND and work alongside families.
- Routine time spent with pastoral or key workers to understand school processes, behaviour systems and the needs of specific pupils.
- Shadowing parental/carer meetings to understand parental engagement and learning how to practise attentive listening in meetings.
- Opportunity to shadow a governance meeting or senior leadership team meeting to understand how meetings are organised and the structures that underpin the school(s).
3, “Just keep going with the curriculum, pupils won’t remember everything.”
The curriculum is a regular source of problem-based discussions in my mentoring meetings. We want pupils to learn and we want to make sure that our curriculum lands well in classrooms.
A persistent problem some mentees feel as new teachers is the need for them to push ahead with teaching the curriculum regardless of the fact that pupils have failed to understand all of it.
There is plenty of research giving us evidence in support of the benefits of responsive teaching in classrooms for pupils. Bishop (2021) showed that high teacher responsiveness in classrooms correlates with achievements in test gains, while Gehrtz et al (2022) found that higher leverage teachers exhibited more curiosity about student thinking, using evidence from dialogue with students to interpret what individuals were thinking. Misconceptions were addressed and tackled before attempting to introduce new content.
Spend time with mentees critically thinking about what pupils may have not understood. Accentuate the value of responsive teaching and using this to gauge pupil misunderstandings before moving on with new curriculum content.
Challenge the view that somehow adequate exam preparation means that pupils must have covered everything in a syllabus or curriculum area.
This is especially important when considering how new teachers support disadvantaged pupils. I have written about this more in-depth in recent SecEd articles, not least examining how teachers can craft curriculum with disadvantage in mind and through understanding the neurology of poverty.
4, “It’s normal to be so stressed as a new teacher”
The problem of stress for new teachers is one that mentors need to be responsive to in the modern school environment. Unrelieved and poorly managed stress can create issues for our health (Fink, 2019; Freidman, 2006).
While some stress and turbulence is expected in the teaching profession, it is important not to normalise this. Too often mentees have shared with me a common belief that high stress is to be expected and embraced as part of their early steps into the profession.
Some strategies I have examined and practised with mentees have included:
- Emotional first aid: Helping mentees realise when certain classroom behaviours cause emotional or stressful responses in them. Use sessions to consider and rehearse actionable approaches to these (e.g. de-escalating confrontations).
- Breathing exercises: Share with mentees breathing exercises or strategies designed to help alleviate stress in the moment. One mentee told me that she found this helpful when about to face a particular class every week!
- Applaud the positive: Encourage mentees to write down and routinely feedback positive moments from their classroom practice. This mitigates against a tendency to only focus on negative or “what went wrong” conversations between mentee and mentor.
- Protect their personal time: Habitually encourage mentees to have downtime away from their work and preparation for classes. This is a habit that will benefit them long into their career. Gently challenge and counter ideas of spending long weekends preparing lessons and working long into academic holidays.
Final thoughts
Mentors have an important role to play in our schools. It shouldn’t always be problem-centred, but there is a need to lean into the value of curiosity.
Above all, remember that mentoring is not a mechanical approach to learning. Instructional coaching, deliberate practice and developmental drop-ins are all useful tools for sharpening the skills of mentees. Yet, relationship and curiosity must facilitate this.
Mentoring is a relationship that must be built on trust and with a long-term commitment to the development of the whole person (Megginson & Clutterbuck, 2005).
Sean Harris is a doctoral researcher with Teesside University investigating the ways in which system leaders can help to address the problems of poverty and educational inequality in schools. He is also a trust improvement leader at Tees Valley Education, an all-through multi-academy trust serving communities in the North East of England. Follow Sean on X (Twitter) @SeanHarris_NE and read his previous best practice articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/sean-harris
Further information & resources
- Bishop: Responsiveness and intellectual work: Features of mathematics classroom discourse related to student achievement. Journal of the Learning Sciences (30,3), 2021.
- Chen et al: Positive attitude toward math supports early academic success: Behavioral evidence and neurocognitive mechanisms, Psychological Science (29,3), 2018.
- DfE: Early Career Framework, 2019.
- Fink: Stress: Physiology, biochemistry, and pathology, Handbook of Stress Series, Academic Press, 2019.
- Friedman: Classroom management and teacher stress and burnout: Handbook of Classroom Management, Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues, 2006.
- Gehrtz, Brantner & Andrews: How are undergraduate STEM instructors leveraging student thinking? International Journal of STEM Education (9,1), 2022.
- Hattie: Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, Routledge, 2009.
- Hudson: Developing and sustaining successful mentoring relationships, Journal of Relationships Research (4), 2013.
- Kruger & Dunning: Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence led to inflated self-assessments, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (77,6), 1999.
- McIntosh et al: Wise up: Clarifying the role of metacognition in the Dunning-Kruger effect, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2019.
- Megginson & Clutterbuck: Techniques for coaching and mentoring, Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann, 2005.
- Tsai et al: Effectiveness of tutor shadowing on faculty development in problem-based learning, BMC Medical Education 22, 2022.
- Zee & Koomen: Engaging children in the upper secondary grades: Unique contributions of teacher self-efficacy, autonomy support, and student-teacher relationships, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 2019.