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| Mentoring is all about a relationship |
Mentoring
The literary
meaning of the word mentor is ‘father figure’ who guides, supports, and develops
a young person. Ehrich (2004) found from the analysis of literature that
throughout history, mentoring has played a critical role in developing teachers
and enhancing their teaching skills. Mentoring is a relationship between an
expert and a beginning teacher in which the expert teaches, coaches, plans,
observes, provides feedback, and reflects on his/her own and mentee’s learning.
In
traditional mentoring services, the locus of power lies with the authority that
uses it to teach, develop and support the teachers. This is a long-term process
and provides the mentee with role modeling to follow. Morse (2004) stated that
the long-term mentor-mentee relationship is established by the organization or
mutual agreement between mentor and mentee usually initiated by the mentor.
In the
current educational domain mentoring is considered as an effective professional
development tool to integrate the novice teachers into school culture and a
means of socializing the novice teacher to the skills, knowledge, and
depositions required for teaching (Morse, 2004).
Intensive mentoring
The
professional development model “intensive mentoring” according to (Flesh, 2005)
gives the confidence to the mentees to implement a variety of teaching
strategies to improve teaching and learning in the classroom.
There
are four major approaches to mentoring namely observation, apprenticeship,
competence, and reflection used by the mentors for professional development of
their mentees but Intensive Mentoring as Kwan and Real (2005) named it as
“planned mentoring” is an alternative approach integrating some aspects of all
four approaches (Flesh, 2005). This model of mentoring includes the teaching by
mentor alongside the teacher in the classroom throughout the day for a period
of two-week. During this period classroom observations are carried out, pre and
post-observation conferences are conducted, classroom teaching and learning are
reflected and on the basis of observation feedback (Arnold, 2006) is provided.
References
Arnold, E. (2006). Assessing
the quality of mentoring: Sinking or learning to swim? ELT
Journal, 60(2), 117-124.
Ehrich, L. C. (2004). Formal
mentoring programs in education and other professions: A review of the
literature. Educational Administration
Quarterly, 40(4), 518-540.
Flesh, G. (2005). Mentoring
the non-coping teacher: A preliminary study. Journal of
Education for Teaching, 31(2), 69-86.
Kawan, T., & Real, F. L.
(2005). Mentors’ perceptions of their roles in mentoring student
teachers. Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education,
33(3), 275-287.
Morse, S. M. (2004).
Constructing Mentors: Latina educational leaders’ role models and
mentors. Educational Administration Quarterly, 40(4), 561-590.
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