Source: Teacher Development, Volume 16, Issue 1, 2012, pages 43-54.
The authors examined the perceptions of 136 elementary school beginning teachers across a Rocky Mountain state in the US regarding the mentoring support they received during their first year teaching.
Beginning teachers were asked to report the types of mentoring support they received and to rate the helpfulness of this support on the Mentoring Support Survey.
An analysis of variance was then used to compare the scale scores of teachers with the administrator-facilitated mentoring supports of common planning time with their mentors and/or release time to observe other teachers.
Results indicate that beginning teachers who received both common planning time with a mentor and release time to observe other teachers rated the mentoring experiences they had as significantly more helpful than beginning teachers who were not provided these mentoring supports.
Of the two, provision of common planning time was the most important type of administrator-facilitated support.