Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

This study examined eleven K-8 interns’ perceptions of their mathematics mentoring support provided to first-year teacher interns and factors that influenced their ability to teach mathematics. Semi-structured interviews revealed that district and grade-level campus mentors provided the greatest amount of mathematics instruction and pedagogically based support to interns. Three factors most instrumental in developing the ability to teach mathematics were (a) manipulative use, (b) planning of classroom instruction and activities, and (c) execution of the lesson.

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.

In this paper the authors articulate a view of mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms, fostering a redefinition of traditional roles and practices within mentor-protg models. From the perspectives of a senior administrator and two assistant professors, the authors revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which the authors were engaged while working in an approach to arts-based educational research. The authors analyzed their work together while deconstructing the ways in which the authors have supported and unsettled each other. Through narrative inquiry the authors share reflections from dissertation research experiences.

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.