Mentoring, Organizational Learning and Peer Relationships in Teacher Training

Abstract

Topic

The research project focuses on teachers' organizational learning and professionalization by mentoring in German teacher training.

Research Questions

The overarching research question of this study is:  

How are orientations formed among mentor:ing students in the preparatory service for teaching at high schools?

Further questions are:

1. How do structures of pedagogical action show up in the mentoring activities of teachers?

2. What differences can be reconstructed between teachers entering the profession and experienced teachers?

3) How is organizational learning and the collective professionalization of mentors reflected in the preparatory service?

Objectives

This paper focuses on the question how organizational learning and peer relationships become apparent in mentoring in German  teacher training.

Conceptual framework

In Germany, trainee teachers must undergo a dual teacher induction training based in two different kinds of organizations. Next to teaching at school, they are being assessed at teacher training seminaries. At their training schools, trainee teachers are being accompanied by mentoring teachers (mentors) whose marginalized main purpose is to endorse the trainee teachers’ preparations and reflections of lessons. While their mentoring functions are largely unknown, mentors find themselves faced with contradictory requirements caused by their status as educators between the organizational demands of school education on the one hand and adult education on the other (Gergen, 2021). It is generally assumed that (self-)reflection of their own and their mentees’ lessons has a reciprocal impact on mentors' professional developments as well as on their schools' developments as "learning organizations" marked by learning in, from and between organizations (Göhlich et al, 2014, p. 3 ff.). It is commonly assumed that school-based mentoring of teacher candidates promotes organizational learning  and initiates processes of professionalization and educational processes (Göhlich et al., 2018). Mentors also assume that they receive impulses for their own learning and professionalization by interaction with trainee teachers. However, findings from a reconstructive study on mentoring in teacher training show that learning processes in mentoring don't necessarily lead to mentors' professionalization but rather to their own socialization in peer relationships and peer networks (Köhler et al., 2016).

Methodologically, this study makes use of Documentary Method based on knowledge sociology (Bohnsack, 2014). It aims at the reconstruction of conjunctives and communicative knowledge of mentors, by means of which the orientation frames of corner cases of the sample in the social space become visible. Reconstructions of narrations of a sample of 12 interviewed mentors (6 career starters and 6 experiences teachers) focus the habitualized orientations structuring actions quite independently from the subjectively expressed sense of statements. Thus, the key research question asks how mentors in teacher induction training express their guiding norms and orientations.

As it turns out, mentoring tandems in teacher training share a common task, but can also be described as "forced communalization". Generally speaking, in dyadic mentoring tandems, mentors act "at eye level" with mentees (Gergen, 2021). They are met with trust in socially structured situations and spaces and have a formative influence on the socialization of mentees, which in turn affects their own socialization into school. In mentoring itself, young professionals are adapted to existing values, norms, and behavioral patterns, thus maintaining the continuity of the social system of the training school organization. In addition to that, relationships in mentoring are characterized by the principle of friendship (Köhler, 2016, pp. 60 ff.)In the reconstructions of developmental processes among mentors in mentoring in the preparatory service, in which organizational learning such as learning between organizations could be identified (Göhlich et al., 2014, p.3) it becomes apparent that learning takes place within the framework of peer relationships. It neither points to a dyadic mentoring relationship nor to differentiated forms of mentoring such as reverse mentoring. In the context of the thematic areas of "teaching" (planning, implementation and reflection) and "school culture", these peer relationships are characterized by elements of friendship, the acquisition of cultural and social capital and processes of recognition, and not, as assumed, by the acquisition of cultural capital on the part of the mentor (Bourdieu, 1976). However, learning between organizations could be reconstructed in the context of "counseling". This leads to the supposition that mentoring in German teacher training supports a solidification of organizational structures at schools rather than innovation. Possibilities of implementig innovations into schools as "learning organizations" by innnovationa labs, network coaching and train the trainer approaches ( Weber, 2009; Weber, 2009b, Weber et al., 2020) should be put forward discussed with a wider audience.

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