3 things that you can do right now
Pause for thought: Remember back to when you were a mentee. How can you make your mentee feel welcome and have a sense of belonging in their placement?
Embrace the fact mentees will benefit from a variety of different mentoring or coaching styles and keep this in mind when working with your mentee who might have a different set of skills or point of view to you or require reasonable adjustments to support their journey.
Consider how your teaching practice models the attitudes and behaviours you would expect from your mentee. Ensure that you are not only guiding or coaching your mentee what to do but modelling how to do it as well.
In this section
Respect Learners
In this section we focus on:
- respecting individual learners and diverse learning communities (including part-time and second-career teachers)
- recognising and identifying the concerns of teachers and helping to create conditions that support their growth
- being culturally aware and promoting social justice in teacher education
- embracing ethical leadership practices in education
Take a journey back to your first day on a new placement. The new commute, building, classrooms, staff – the list goes on. All these things can make even the most confident of wannabe teachers feel nervous. As a trainee or Early Career Teacher, you walk into your brand new classroom with a stomach full of butterflies and can be greeted by either a friendly, welcoming face who is prepared and ready for your arrival or a stressed and distracted teacher who looks like they have 20 other priorities before speaking to you. It is clear which would be preferable for your mentee and the best mentors are the ones who respect the concerns of the mentee and help to settle them in to their placement as early as possible. Fostering a positive professional relationship can have a huge impact on the progress of your mentee and allows you to manage any challenging conversations that you may need to have during the placement or ECT year. Respecting your mentee’s current ability and confidence level will allow you to create an environment in which your mentee can feel comfortable, make progress and grow into a better practitioner.
Just as we do with the pupils we teach, it is vital that mentors within our schools respect the different values and cultures that mentees hold, including meeting the needs of neurodivergent mentees. If supporting a trainee, the training provider will organise an ‘alternative experience’ for the trainee. This may mean you have a trainee who joins you for a short placement having been immersed in a school that has a very different context and ethos to yours. This is also true of any induction period where you may be supporting a new teacher within your school. There may be a period of adjustment that the mentee, especially those who will need reasonable adjustments, will need to make and you can make this far easier by explaining the decisions you take both as a practitioner and as a school. This makes things you might consider to be obvious explicit to the mentee and will allow them to adapt to their new context far quicker.
Meeting the needs of Neurodivergent Students
“A lot of people just fail to understand that every day, every second, we are living in a world that was not made for us. It was made for a different sensory processing system. It’s like navigating when you are a bit drunk, you are trying to comprehend things that don’t make sense, but something that makes sense to you doesn’t make sense to others.”
Unite Students has produced this report (2023) that explores the experiences and needs of autistic students and/or those with ADHD when making the transition to university and living in student accommodation. There is much we can learn with regard to supporting our neurodivergent adults in schools and educational settings.
“I kind of have that place to sit”: First-year teachers' experiences of belonging
This meta analysis explores the first year of teaching which can be fraught with difficulties. A sense of belonging can offer succour for first-year teachers as they navigate their new roles. Studies have explored belonging in K-12 students, but few have examined belonging in first-year teachers. To address this gap, I took a qualitative multiple case study approach using data from two semi-structured interviews with nine teachers during their first year in the classroom to explore how they experienced belonging at their schools. Five themes emerged across the cases. I detail these findings and offer suggestions for schools to improve sense of belonging in first-year teachers.
Peer Mentor Handbook
This handbook from the Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania lays out the boundaries that should be in place between a peer to peer mentor relationship. It breaks down the skills and qualities the best mentors will need to have and – just as importantly – the things you might want to avoid.
Teacher self-efficacy as an aspect of narrative self-schemata
This study represents a theoretical investigation of teacher self-efficacy using abductive interpretative phenomenological analysis in the context of initial teacher education. We reveal the process through which a pre-service teacher's self-schema adapts in response to his first classroom teaching experience. We also observe that narrative has a role in this self-schema adaptation. Consequently, we show that teacher self-efficacy is an aspect of a more generalised narrative self-schema. This offers an alternative perspective on how teacher self-efficacy is developed. It contributes to a deeper understanding of preservice teachers' professional learning and a new understanding of the concept of self-efficacy more generally. © 2021
Access the research paper here (Watson and Marshall, 2019).
Education Support – Looking after teacher wellbeing
Education Support work alongside education staff to ensure that if and when a member of staff is struggling with their own mental health, they have somewhere to seek support. This helpful website gives tips and hints on how to look after your own and others mental health, within an educational context.
For Learning in Teacher Education - FLiTE website
Teacher Educator Story 11 considers supporting student teachers’ wellbeing and Story 12 explores the challenge of avoiding prejudice against a student teacher. FLiTE resources can be used for individual or collaborative professional development of teacher educators working in initial teacher education partnerships.
Download the resources here
Social Media and Mental Health in Schools – (Positive Mental Health)
Jonathan Glazzard and Colin Mitchell (Critical Publishing, 2018)
Jonathan Glazzard and Colin Mitchell examine how schools can support their students and staff by using social media safely and how to ensure we reap the benefits that technology can bring. Chapter 5 focuses on how we as teachers use these platforms and how it can be valuable for a trainee to have advise on in an early stage of their career.
Tackling Social Disadvantage Through Teacher Education
Ian Thompson (Critical Publishing, 2017)
This bite sized book from the University of Oxford’s Ian Thompson looks at how policy defines disadvantage across our schools and how we as teacher educators can try to impact on these issues in our own contexts. There is a lot of learning that is applicable to our work as teacher educators, as well as practitioners in the classroom.
Coaching Conversations with Jim Knight
This podcast episode dives deep into the concept of nominal change in education. The conversation unpacks the challenges, implications, and strategies for breaking free from cycles. The conversation advocates the need for a champion for novice learners.
Respect Learners - Further Development
