Promoting versatility in mentor teachers’ use of supervisory skills

Abstract

Mentor teachers need a versatile supervisory skills repertoire. Besides taking the prevalent role of daily advisor and instructor, mentor teachers should also be able to stimulate reflection in student teachers. Video recordings of 60 mentoring dialogues were analysed, both before and after a mentor teacher training aimed at developing the encourager role. Mentor teachers' repertoires of supervisory skills were found to consist of an average of seven supervisory skills. After training, a shift was observed in the frequencies and duration with which supervisory skills were used. Although considerable inter-individual variability existed between mentor teachers, training positively affected the use of supervisory skills for stimulating reflection in student teachers.

Empowering Pre-service Teacher Supervisors’ Perspectives: A Relational-Cultural Approach towards Mentoring

“…It has been recognized that mentoring is a complex role that requires the supervising teacher to model good teaching practice, stimulate reflection, be encouraging, provide counselling and provide constructive daily feedback to the pre-service teacher (Crasborn, Hennisson, Brouwer, Korthagen, & Bergen 2008;Geen, 2002). LeCornu and Ewing (2008) suggest that current approaches to professional experience are not just about practicing teaching but also about learning about teaching so that both the supervising teacher and the pre-service teacher gain through the relationship.…”

Clarifying pre-service teacher perceptions of mentor teachers’ developing use of mentoring skills

“…The last step of one cycle is the first step of the following cycle. For more information on the elaboration of this framework within the context of the SMART training, see Crasborn, Hennissen, Brouwer, Korthagen, and Bergen (2008). The programme consisted of three main components: training, peer consultation and coaching.…”

“…For coding the mentor teachers' utterances (see column 4 in Table 1), a category system developed by Crasborn et al (2008) was used by three independent raters. This system distinguishes 15 overt mentoring skills: showing attentive behaviour (1), asking an open starting question (2), asking for concreteness (3), summarising feeling (showing empathy) (4), summarising content (5), showing genuineness (6), completing sentence/clarifying question (7), confronting (giving feedback, summarising inconsistencies, utilizing the here and now) (8), generalising (asking for similar situations) (9), helping in making things explicit (10), helping in finding and choosing alternatives (11), asking for something new (12), giving information (13), giving opinion/assessing (14), and giving advice/ instruction (15).…”

Interpretations of Mentoring during Early Childhood Education Mentor Training

“…A possible limitation is the influence of variables outside the programme that may have affected the mentors' professional development (see Crasborn et al, 2008). Another limitation resulted from the data being collected during the mentor training at the university.…”