Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between mentors’ mentoring conceptions and their mentoring motives. The findings showed that a motivation to mentor for personal learning was more strongly associated with a developmental conception of mentored learning to teach than with an instrumental mentoring conception. The same was found for a motivation to mentor for contributing to the profession, but less pronounced.

This article presents a research and intervention methodology developed in an online continuing teacher education programme. In particular, this article analyses the mentors' professional development processes and the contributions to professional development of their participation in the research group responsible for Online Mentoring Programme (OMP). This programme collaborative research involved an articulated dialogue between researchers and teachers aimed at constructing new knowledge and searching for solutions to concrete practical everyday problems of the OMP. The data revealed that the mentors, in collaboration with the researchers, have been able to critically examine their work with the novice teachers, to develop, implement and evaluate interventions. This collaboration allow the mentors to promote both their own and the novice teachers’ teacher development and construction of new knowledge.

In this article, the authors describe a pilot mentoring program which includes the under-representation of female researchers in senior academic positions by supporting early career development for young academics at two faculties at a Danish university. The authors analyze the benefits of mentoring to postdoc female researchers’ career, to the mentees, and to the higher education institution. The implementation of the structured mentoring program demonstrates a level of institutional support that helped strengthen self-confidence and individual development, and provided access to experienced researchers’ knowledge about career planning and integration in the research environment.

The purpose of this study is to describe the strategies used by a highly regarded, secondary biology mentor teacher to foster a preservice biology teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). In this study, the mentoring was exclusively focused on beliefs about effective science teaching and how students’ learn science. The mentor teacher helped preservice teacher understand why he should teach in particular ways. The mentor also helped the mentee develop his topic-specific knowledge of students’ understanding of science by discussing common misconceptions revealed in students’ conversations and examination responses. She modeled ways for the mentee to access students’ misconceptions.