Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

In this study, the researchers investigated the possible relationship between mentoring and intentionality with respect to beginning teachers' intentions to remain in the profession. Beginning teachers who were matched by grade level, who received assistance with the supports investigated, and who met with mentors at least once monthly for the specified activities were more likely to commit to remaining in the profession than their peers who had received less support.

This mixed-methods investigation examined the collaborative mentoring of teachers in a large school system in the south-eastern United States. The investigation was guided by two purposes. The first was to examine collaborative mentoring as unstructured peer-to-peer coaching. The second was to examine how licensure courses contributed to the emergence of collaborative mentoring. After completing courses, 84 teachers reported significant increases in frequency and duration of interactions for sharing best practices with colleagues. Of 33 novice teachers recently trained in teaching ELLs, most found themselves mentoring veteran teachers yet untrained in teaching this student group.

The authors desired a mentoring approach for graduate students in education that would foster an understanding and practice of teaching as a relational process. This article provides a practitioner account of an action research study focused on the development of such an approach. In a semester-long feminist participatory study, the authors utilized weekly dialogues, reflective journals, classroom observations and written documents to explore the mentoring experience of one graduate advisor, one graduate teaching assistant, and two critical friends.

The research project Adaptive Teaching Competency seeks to conceptualise the processes of tuning teaching to individual students' learning needs and to empirically test, within the field of science teaching, to what extent Adaptive Teaching Competency can be fostered through teacher education. 32 primary and secondary teachers took part in an intervention to foster their Adaptive Teaching Competency based on content-focused coaching whilst 18 teachers formed the control group.