Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

The Early Childhood Professional Mentoring Group (ECPMG) was established to develop a forum of support for recent graduates of the authors' university's Masters programs in Early Childhood and Early Childhood Special Education. Moreover, this group was established to create a process for exploring and evaluating the ways that the university's programs are preparing professionals for practice. In order to gain insight into the process and the value of the group, throughout its 1st full academic year, the authors, as cofacilitators, conducted a 45-minute debriefing session after each monthly meeting. During these sessions, the authors reflected on the group's dynamics, topics or themes presented, and their own ways of participating, collaborating, and making meaning of the experience.

The paper presents a reciprocal model of mentoring as an alternative approach to more traditional mentoring models. A mentor, experienced with online course delivery and pedagogy, worked with six online instructors over two academic terms within a reciprocal mentorship model. The model was designed to build a collaborative learning relationship which would benefit each partner. The mentoring was scheduled on a just-in-time basis in response to each online instructor's needs.

The authors explore how differences in cognitive complexity were related to role expectations, conceptions of teaching problems, and the use of evidence for justifying beliefs. They draw on data from a US study of nine mentors and mentees, including mentee scores on the Reasoning about Current Issues (RCI) Test, which offers a measure of cognitive complexity.

This article reports the findings of a review of the international research literature on mentoring beginning teachers. Research identifies a range of potential benefits and costs associated with mentoring. It suggests that the key to maximizing the former and minimizing the latter lies in the realization of a number of conditions for successful mentoring, such as the effective selection and preparation of mentors.