Session Information
01 SES 01 A, Research on Mentoring (Part 1)
Paper Session to be continued in 01 SES 02 B
Contribution
Around 50% of young professionals who choose teaching careers around the world drop out within the first five years of school for various reasons. In most cases, young professionals face physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. That is why it is so important to provide help and support to any inexperienced teacher in the early years of their career (McKinley, 2021). The mentoring process is carried out every year in every school in Kazakhstan. However, monitoring how much this process affects the professional development of young professionals at school is neglected. Duse et al. (2017) provide several definitions of mentoring in their article. First, there is the relationship between a teacher with more mentoring experience and a teacher with less experience. Secondly, within this process, an experienced teacher develops certain skills and knowledge to contribute to the professional and personal growth of a less experienced teacher. In addition, Duse et al. (2017) note that mentoring is a major responsibility for schoolteachers and school administrators. The articles on this topic show that the mentoring process has many benefits not only for the mentee, but also for the mentor. Gilles and Wilson (2004) state that the mentor develops confidence and professional courage, opening the way to leadership opportunities, while Lopez-Real and Kwan (2005) note that mentors' professional growth occurs through reflection and mutual collaboration. Hudson (2013) found in her research that mentors can improve their interpersonal skills and pedagogical knowledge in addition to their leadership roles.
This study was conducted in one of the schools in the western region of the country. The mentoring process has been introduced in the school since 2015. Every year, experienced teachers are appointed as mentors for young professionals or new teachers. In general, mentoring is mandatory for all teachers, that is, 90-95% of schoolteachers participate in this process every year. However, over the years,
it began to be noticed that teachers do not take mentoring very seriously. This means that there are situations when mentors do not provide adequate support to young professionals, and mentees do not learn much from them. In order to increase the responsibility of teachers, the school has drawn up a special letter of agreement between the mentor and the mentee. In the agreement letter, both the mentor
and the mentee promised to participate responsibly in the process and even put their signatures. However, this measure did not show any results. The agreement remained only on paper.
Since the beginning of the academic year, 67 senior teachers of our school have worked with 67 young professionals. Throughout the year, the mentors conduct various forms of work with the mentees: professional interviews, feedback, lesson observation and joint analysis of the lesson, counseling and monthly reflection on the experience.
The main goal of this research work is to determine the effectiveness of the mentoring process at the school and to propose solutions to the obstacles encountered during mentoring.
Research questions: 1. What do young professionals learn from their mentors during the mentoring process? 2. What are the barriers to mentoring? 3. What actions should be taken to eliminate the identified obstacles?
The importance of the research work: the lack of research on the effectiveness of the mentoring process in the context of Kazakhstan, the opportunity of the research results to give ideas to mentors and school administrators about the effective organization of the mentoring process in their schools.
Method
To ensure triangulation, we used three research methods: interviews, analysing mentees’ reflexive reports and mentors’ yearly reports. 4 mentors and mentees participated in the interview. The experience of mentors in mentoring was different: one was engaged in mentoring for only 2 years, while the other had 6 years of experience in this work. The interview questions with the mentors were aimed at obtaining information about the advantages of mentoring, the difficulties encountered and how they were solved. The interviews revealed the following beneficial aspects: the mentor's help in preparing for the external summative assessment, sharing various methods, support in open lessons, help with assessment and help in planning the learning process. The interview results with mentors show that the mentoring process was conducted at a good level. This can be evidenced by the information provided by mentors. However, a common problem for all mentors is that the goals set in the annual plan are not fully realized. Various factors influenced this situation. One of the mentors made a plan without determining the needs of the mentee, while the other one saw the mentee's non-participation in the planned activities as a problem. One of the obstacles encountered during mentoring is that the mentor and the mentee often cannot attend each other's classes. However, this problem could find its solution by some mentors: mentees were required to record their lessons and the mentor could give feedback by watching the videorecording of the lesson. To monitor the mentoring process, a monthly reflective report was collected from the mentors. The reflective report consisted of 8 questions and was initially presented to learners as a Microsoft Word document. To make this process easy, the reflective questions were sent to the mentees as a Google forms questionnaire. Based on the results of the analysis of the monthly report, the difficulties in the mentoring process can be attributed only to insufficient time. Mentees stated that this difficulty was caused by the fact that many teachers were busy with the lessons, and they had lessons at the same time in the timetable. The mentor's annual report, the mentors’ work plan made at the beginning of the year and the mentees’ annual reports were compared. It became clear that there were cases when the mentor was indifferent to the mentoring process, that is, the measures and activities set in the annual plan were not reflected in the annual report.
Expected Outcomes
As a result of the study, it was clearly observed that this process has a great contribution to the professional development of young professionals, because mentees can receive valuable information necessary for teaching from their mentors. There are experienced teachers who have been able to influence the professional development of a young specialist, taking responsibility for the mentoring work assigned to him. Although there were some difficulties in monitoring each other's lessons, the solution to this problem was quickly found with the help of technology. The fact that some of the mentors' planned actions are not carried out requires a great deal of responsibility on the part of the mentor and the mentee. It is planned to introduce the following recommendations: 1. To increase the responsibility of mentors and increase their interest in the process, at the end of the year, to identify the most active mentors and award them with diplomas of the school director. 2. To create criteria for identifying the best mentor. The criteria: controlling the quality of the mentee's teaching: regular participation in the lesson (at least 3 lessons), the evident connection between the lessons and the teacher's professional development goal, providing constructive feedback and methodological assistance according to the mentee's needs, conducting professional conversations and various educational events by the mentor (seminar, webinar, coaching, training, master class), being involved in Lesson Study, participation in conferences. 3. To monitor the progress in the professional development of mentees, regularly monitor the classes throughout the academic year, and for this purpose, create a special commission made up of school teachers. At the end of the school year, the best mentors will be determined based on specially created criteria. We hope that this innovation will bring even a small positive change to the mentoring process.
References
1. Brondyk, S., & Searby, L. (2013). Best practices in mentoring: Complexities and possibilities. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education. 2. Cornu, R. L. (2005). Peer mentoring: Engaging pre‐service teachers in mentoring one another. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 13(3), 355-366. 3. Duse, C. S., Duse, D. M., & Karkowska, M. (2017). How important is mentoring in education?. In MATEC Web of Conferences (Vol. 121, p. 12005). EDP Sciences. 4. Gilles*, C., & Wilson, J. (2004). Receiving as well as giving: Mentors' perceptions of their professional development in one teacher induction program. Mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 12(1), 87-106. 5. Hudson, P. (2013). Mentoring as professional development:‘growth for both’mentor and mentee. Professional development in education, 39(5), 771-783. 6. Lopez‐Real, F., & Kwan, T. (2005). Mentors' perceptions of their own professional development during mentoring. Journal of education for teaching, 31(1), 15-24. 7. McKinley, D. (2021, March 5). The importance of mentoring new teachers. Incompassing Education. Retrieved from https://incompassinged.com/2017/07/14/the-importance-of-mentoring-new-teachers/. 8. Ozcan, K., & Balyer, A. (2012). Negative factors affecting the process of mentoring at schools. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 46, 5414-5419. 9. Patterson, S. C. M. (2013). Educative mentoring: Challenges and enablers of implementation in an intermediate school context. 10. Sundli, L. (2007). Mentoring—A new mantra for education?. Teaching and teacher education, 23(2), 201-214.
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