Mentoring is effective for novice teacher’s professional development. Hobson et al. (2009) reviewed many empirical research on mentoring and pointed out a few benefits for mentees; 1) emotional and psychological support, 2) developing their teaching skills and classroom management skills, 3) developing their ability to manage their time and amount of their work. At the same time, it is claimed that the effect of mentoring on developing teaching skills is limited because of various factors of a mentoring/induction program. The reason appears to be why teaching skills in ‘ know-how’, not ‘how to’. In this study, ‘know-how’ means ‘wisdom’, which includes both knowing and doing, and it is often said that a knowing-doing gap is a critical problem for teaching skills tradition in teacher education. Namely, teaching is craft or art. For example, Stenhouse (1984) offered the craft analogy of the ‘innumerable stonemasons who adorned English parish churches’ in his illustration of the excellent teacher in declaring teaching to be art. A critical problem, therefore, is thought to be how to teach teaching skills as craft/art to novice teachers.

   On the subject of transferring wisdom, on-going intervention is said to be the most effective method from the management study by Leonard et al. (2005). This method provides ‘aha moment’ to novices when a mentor intervenes. A mentor’s intervention becomes understandable for a mentee. Based on this method, this study focuses on how a mentor supports his mentee to develop mentee’s teaching skills. The developed mentoring system has on-going cognitive intervention by a mentor during mentee’s teaching.

   Another reason of using on-going intervention is why most teachers cannot act based on what they know in their teaching. This means the knowing-doing gap in teaching. It is nonsense for schoolteachers to know about teaching, classroom management, and student guidance, and so on in more detail without doing. However, a mentor tends to explain/teach many things related to teaching before a mentee’s teaching, which means a mentee comes to know many things about teaching, but he/she cannot always do according to a mentor’s explanation. This issue relates to the concept of mind by Ryle(1950). Asada(2015) explored the knowing-doing gap in Japanese elementary school teaching, but only identified which teaching behavior has the knowing-doing gap. With respect to this issue, that is, the knowing-doing gap or the relationship between knowing that and knowing how, as Pfeffer et al. (1999) pointed out in their management study, some factors such as mentee’s belief, mentee’s own pet theory, fear and lack of self-confidence etc. seem to prevent doing on his/her knowledge. However, the cause of the knowing-doing gap might have not been identified in teacher education research. It is very difficult to identify causes of the knowing-doing gap in teaching because teaching is very complex and has the nature of craft or art. In an opposite way, if on-going intervention by Leonard et al.(2005) is effective for a mentee’s teaching skill development, it may have the potentiality of providing both knowing and doing to a particular teaching situation as against a mentee’s belief and so on.

   As above, the purpose of this study is to develop the mentoring system using on-going intervention and evaluate its effectiveness in order to improve/enhance the functions of mentoring, especially career function; developing teaching skill. 

Asada,T.(2015) The Knowing-Doing Gap in Elementary School Teaching in Japan. Presented Paper at ECER2015 in Budapest Hobson,A.J. et al.(2009) Mentoring beginning teachers. Teaching & Teacher Education 25, 207-216 Leonard,D., Swap,W.(2005) Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and transfer Eduring Business Wisdom. Harvard Business School Press Pfeffer,J., Sutton,R.(1999) The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Harvard Business School Press Ryle,G.(1949) The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson’s University Library