Mentoring isn’t a new concept. Even the Ancient Greeks understood the value of a mentor.
The philosopher Socrates was a mentor to Plato and this had a significant impact on shaping Plato’s ideas and theories of learning.
This undoubtedly shaped Plato’s later mentoring of his own student, Aristotle. All three helped to architect the theories of learning that we see today.
There is now a plethora of research literature that shows how important mentoring is to the development of practitioners (Connor & Pokora, 2007; Megginson & Clutterbuck, 2005) and we continue to serve in a profession today that is shaped by early mentor-mentee dialogue.
So, how do we make sure that our own relationship with our mentor is effective and can help and support our professional growth and what happens in our classrooms?
SecEd Supplement: Early career teachers – Forming healthy habits: This article was first published in SecEd’s recent 20-page supplement for early career teachers. The free pdf download offers advice, tips and ideas to help new teachers survive and thrive at the chalkface. Themes include pedagogy, workload control, wellbeing, mentoring, professional conduct, and general advice. Download it here!
Pinpoint your Plato
It is important to understand what the role of the mentor is in relation to your journey as an ECT.
According to the DfE (2022), your mentor under the Early Career Framework (ECF) is there to support you through your two-year induction. They are not acting in the role of an assessor, but rather a mentor who will work alongside you to provide support, challenge, and growth across your first two years at the chalkface.
Their responsibilities include:
- Working with school to make sure the ECT receives a high-quality induction.
- Meeting regularly with the ECT to provide support and feedback.
- Providing or arranging mentoring and coaching around specific phases and subject areas.
- Taking prompt, appropriate action if the ECT is having difficulties.
If your school is working with a specific ECF provider (e.g. Ambition Institute, Teach First), then there may be specific training or procedures that the mentor follows as part of their commitment to you.
Either way, it is important for you to remember that their role is one of support.
It is your core responsibility to engage with this support and accept the challenge and reflection that your mentor will encourage.
As Lofthouse and Thomas (2017) said, mentoring and coaching share a distinct ability to create a “productive place” for professional dialogue. You must prioritise this as an ECT.
Engage with expertise
The expertise of your mentor and other colleagues is essential to you across so many crucial areas – assessment, pedagogy, establishing good routines…
Get into the rhythm of making regular but brief notes from your lessons. Make a list of the questions that emerge from your practice, annotate those resources that didn’t “land” well in your lessons, and highlight aspects that went better than expected.
Then use these notes in your meetings to tap into the expertise of your mentor and invite them to help you understand why something went well (or not) and how things might be improved.
This will help you to form the vital habit of being a reflective practitioner and will also support your mentor in their work too.
Beware the curse of knowledge
Your mentor is the expert to lean on. But experts can sometimes forget what it is like to be the learner.
The “curse of knowledge” refers to the notion that experts can often forget what it is like to be the novice and therefore may struggle to disseminate the expertise into digestible or manageable steps for the learner.
Brown et al (2014) in Making it Stick comment that this occurs when teachers develop a “tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered”.
It is therefore important for you to work with your mentor at breaking down the expertise into simple and understandable steps.
Be clear when you do not understand something. Invite your mentor to model the advice into chunks for you.
I often ask my mentees to playback the advice I have given using these questions (the last is probably your most important):
- What is the strategy or approach?
- How is this different to what I have been using in the classroom so far?
- Why do we think this strategy will help?
- When can we practise it together?
Sessions with your mentor should not always be seated. Get out of your chair together and practise the strategy that you have identified. This will develop your confidence enormously and it will mean that you have a little experience of what it will look and sound like in the classroom.
Go into the village
The proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” has been said to embody the spirit of several African cultures.
In the context of your two years as an ECT, your school is your village and you should embrace the privilege of being a learner in this community.
Draw on the expertise of others across the school – not just your mentor. Use your ECT years as an opportunity to find out more about the mechanics of other areas of school life beyond your immediate subject or team.
I have worked extensively with ECTs who have benefited from seeing multiple approaches to teaching techniques or other aspects. I often recommend the following:
Spending a day (or even a week) working alongside colleagues in the pastoral team to get an idea of the needs of children, barriers to learning and how they might be overcome.
Spending time with the SENCO to understand SEN processes, responding to particular SEND needs, and spotting signs for early intervention.
Shadowing a member of the senior leadership team to understand more about the role(s) of a leader and how this benefits what we do in classrooms.
A day working with a local community group or advocate to understand local need and the pain points of a particular part of the community that you serve.
It is important to negotiate time with your mentor for this learning. It may be much harder to find these learning opportunities after your induction, so form the habit and embrace these moments now.
Learn from mistakes
Back to Ancient Greece for a moment. The philosopher Socrates was known for speaking his mind. He spoke against the leaders of his society and eventually was charged with the “corruption of the youth of Athens”.
It is claimed that Socrates refused exile or imprisonment, accepting only the death sentence.
Socrates’ mentee, Plato, learned from this experience. He published an allegory of the cave as a way of communicating his truths and beliefs in a way that might better educate the society of his day. Plato intentionally sought to learn from past mistakes.
As a mentor, there will be hardship at times, challenges and – yes – mistakes. This is the only real way to learn. I have witnessed many tears from ECTs over the years. However, each lesson that goes badly and each negative encounter with a challenging pupil or parent is a great opportunity for learning. Hold on to this fact.
It is important to highlight these moments to your mentor. But you should also create opportunities – invite your mentor to come and watch you teach that really difficult class or in that lesson when you are delivering an unfamiliar topic.
These moments will enable you to prompt dialogue with your mentor about what you might do differently next time.
You could also consider making use of video recording software to capture aspects of a lesson that you know are hard. Use these reflections with your mentor in a mentoring session to unpick the mechanics of what went “wrong” – which pupils struggled to access the task or behaviour issues, for example – and co-lead the conversation to what could be done next time to facilitate more effective learning for your pupils.
Plato said: “If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake”. So, create opportunities for mistake-making and learn from them alongside your mentor.
- Sean Harris is a doctoral researcher with Teesside University and a trust improvement leader at Tees Valley Education in the North East. Follow him on Twitter @SeanHarris_NE and read his previous articles for SecEd via http://bit.ly/seced-harris
Further information & resources
- Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel: Make it Stick: The science of successful learning, Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Connor & Pokora: Coaching and Mentoring at Work: Developing effective practice, Open University Press, 2007.
- DfE: Guidance for mentors: How to support ECF-based training, April 2022: https://bit.ly/3PgGeOz
- Lofthouse & Thomas: Concerning collaboration; Teachers’ perspectives on working in partnerships to develop teaching practices. Professional Development in Education, 43(1), 2017: https://bit.ly/3PZKbYf
- Megginson & Clutterbuck: Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring, Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann, 2005.