Wisdom of the elders: mentors’ perspectives on mentoring learning environments for beginning science and mathematics teachers

New Teacher Learning in a Digital Mentoring Environment: Voices of the Mentors

“…Content-specific support and mentor preparation. Scholars researching contentspecific support and mentor preparation focused on a variety of topics including: (a) program organization (Luft & Patternson, 2002;Shore & Stokes, 2006), (b) mentee and mentor experiences (Maor & McConney, 2015;Nam, Seung, & Go, 2013;Wildman, Magliaro, Niles, & Niles, 1992) and (c) practices of mentoring (Naseem, 2014). Studies like these examples continued to support the rationale for, and highlighted the potential of, content-specific new teacher mentoring as an opportunity for new teachers to reflect on their teaching.…”

“…In sum, mentors may enact different approaches from one another. Maor and McConney (2015) surveyed secondary science and mathematics educator mentors (N = 36) to describe their motivations for participating in a mentoring program and how they benefited in terms of their professional learning. The mentoring experience was identified by participants as a learning environment.…”

“…The benefits of content-specific support were consistent across the studies presented in this section including opportunities to discuss and review teaching with a content-specialists as well as avenues to help mentees implement best practices into their teaching. Though noted as challenging to design for district-based mentoring programs (Shore & Stokes, 2006), in some cases content-specific support satisfied both the psychological and educational needs of mentees (Maor & McConney, 2015;Nam et al, 2013;Naseem, 2014).…”

Maximizing Mentoring Relationships

“…While mentoring may be intended as a professional relationship, the very nature of relationships involve a sense of connectedness between people. Effective mentoring extends beyond sharing subject or pedagogical knowledge (Maor & McConney, 2015), and the overall mentoring experience can be enhanced by mentor/mentee compatibility (Hellsten, Prytula, Ebanks, & Lai, 2009). Interpersonal characteristics are important factors in mentoring relationships (Carter & Francis, 2001); friendships enhance professional relationships (Haack, 2006).…”

Teaching System of Smart Learning Environment for Aerobics Course

“…At present, the practice of smart learning environment has been carried out in many fields, such as natural science [3] and language and art [4]. Taking a course about butterfly and ecology in a middle school as an example, the smart learning environment provided students with real visual and tactile feelings, and students could get close to the living environment of butterflies in the learning process gradually, so as to improve their learning effect effectively in the cooperation and communication [5].…”