Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

In this article, the authors examine the knowledge and practice base of content-focused mentoring drawing from the wisdom of practice of a community of content mentors. The authors reveal three themes: (1) developing novices’ content teaching is a distinct and critical mentor role; (2) to support this role, experienced content mentors identified a complex knowledge/practice base, with mentors’ PCK and knowledge of assessment for content teaching as the most frequently reported domains; and (3) enactment of content-focused mentoring reveals promising practices in guiding novices in assessing and developing students’ disciplinary thinking, as well as, tensions between content-focused and socio-emotional mentor roles.

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of mentors, mentees, and principals pertaining to the first year of mentoring in an induction program. The findings revealed that principals noted little concern with program components and appeared the most satisfied with the mentoring program as a whole. Subsequently, mentors had more positive attitudes than did mentees across grade span, and mentees at the elementary school level had the most positive attitudes among all mentees across grade span. In addition, it was most important to elementary school teachers to participate in mentoring, and also to observe veteran teachers as part of their mentoring activities.

This article presents a unique model of instruction based on co-teaching carried out in the framework of the practice teaching program intended for third year college students. The program was showing the students the pedagogical importance of teaching and involving them critically in ways to improve. The results showed that the students, with the help of the instructors’ modeling of teamwork, succeeded in overcoming many of the conflicts revealed and the difficulties experienced during the shared work training and co-teaching processes. Throughout the program, the students observed the modeling of co-teaching of the instructors from two different areas of expertise, special education and general education, and they and the instructors thus could address many issues evolving from the process.

This study reports on the development of a small-scale, professional development program aimed at preparing preschool teacher assistants to earn the Child Development Associate (CDA). The study examined both the participants’ and mentors’ perceptions of the program. The results revealed overlapping themes across teacher assistants and their mentors, including readiness for the CDA credentialing process, mentoring support/ relationship-building, and mutual respect.