We need more than mentoring

 

Mr Harry Wong Mountain View, California, USA

 

I am somewhat perplexed by the assertion that coaching and mentoring have been an integral part of individual and organizational improvement in the private sector for many years. An examination of any business book, such as the two hottest books currently, Good to Great, by Jim Collins and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy, finds that the word mentoring is never mentioned.

Businesses develop their human capital with structured, organized, coherent, and managed training programs, with the most popular form of human resource development, ‘blended learning'. Blended learning is, as it implies, a blending of a series of learning activities based on the goals and needs of the learner and the business. A mentor could be one component of the blended learning.

No research in support of isolated mentoring

Ted Britton, of WestEd, has shown that currently in more than 30 American states, the universal practice seems remarkably narrow: Mentoring predominates and often there is little more. In many schools, the dominant or sole strategy for supporting new teachers is one-on-one the new teacher to seek each other out. Britton further reports that many mentors are assigned to respond to a new teacher's day-to-day crises and provide survival teaching tips. Mentors are simply a safety net for the new teachers. Mentoring, in and of itself, has no purpose, goal, or agenda for student achievement. Thus, mentoring alone fails to provide evidence of the connection between well-executed professional learning communities and student learning.

In the United States, Sharon Feiman-Nemser writes, in her 1996 ERIC Digest article, ‘Teacher Mentoring: A Critical Review', that mentoring burst onto the educational scene in the early 1980s, yet a review of 20 years of claims about mentoring reveal that few studies exist that show the context, content, and consequences of mentoring.

A research review written by Richard Ingersoll and Jeffrey Kralik (2004) for the Education Commission of the States asserts, ‘Current research does not yet provide definitive evidence of the value of mentoring programs in keeping new teachers from leaving the profession'.

Susan Moore Johnson, of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (2004), states, ‘Although a few new teachers in our study said they would have been lost without their mentors, most provided little evidence that one-on-one mentoring offered much support'.

Johnson further says, ‘Mentoring is all the rage. There is some sort of deep hope on the part of everyone that if you get the right mentor, your life will be saved and you will be the teacher you remember. But the truth is that mentoring pairs seldom are anything but haphazard. They are driven by the schedule. They are often not pairs of people who really know the subjects that the individual is teaching'.

‘Tapping the Potential: Retaining and Developing High-Quality New Teachers', a report from the Alliance for Excellent Education (2004), says, ‘While mentoring is the most widely practiced component of induction, mentoring by itself is not enough to retain and develop teachers. Mentoring programs vary widely and may do little more than ask mentors to check in with new teachers a few times per semester to chat'. The use of mentoring alone, without the other components of induction, is not supported by research as being a proven strategy.

There is a new paradigm out there.

The issue is not mentoring. The issue is when mentoring is used as an isolated event. Mentoring is as sacred as motherhood or the frosting on a cake, but a coherent family has more members than just a mother and a delicious cake has more components than just the frosting.

Children are born ready to think. It's in their genes. Today's Generation Y teachers are wired-in and can learn instantly. They are socially and group-oriented, yet the purveyors of mentoring believe that we still need to teach the present generation how to think for themselves. There is a new paradigm out there. This generation can think, can access information rapidly, can reflect instantly, and want to move ahead at a hell-bent for leather speed. Most importantly, they value thinking together.

As important and as appreciated as mentors may be, I have discovered in communicating with hundreds of new teachers via the website, www.teachers.net that they want two other components that induction programs provide: 1) demonstration classes where they can see other teachers model good teaching, and 2) collaboration where it has been found that teachers remain with a school when they feel strong bonds of connection to a professional learning community that has, at its heart, high-quality interpersonal relationships founded on trust and respect (Wong and Asquith, 2002).

In the United States, Breaux (2003) reports that teachers are typically viewed as independent operators, encouraged to be creative and expected to do a good job behind closed doors. Collaboration is rare. Worse yet, new teachers seldom see another classroom. ‘I never sat in anyone else's classroom even once', laments a first-year teacher. ‘Mine is the only teaching style I know. I felt that sometimes I was reinventing the wheel'. Loneliness and lack of support further exacerbate the problems of beginning teachers.

Induction: structured, comprehensive and focused on professional learning

The term ‘mentoring' is often misused for ‘induction'. Mentoring is what mentors do. A mentor is a single person, whose basic function is to help a new teacher. Mentoring is not induction; it is a component of the induction process.

It must be clarified that induction and mentoring are not the same. The fact that the two terms are used interchangeably and synonymously does not make it correct. Induction is the name given to a comprehensive, coherent, and sustained professional development process that is organized by a school district to train, support, and retain new teachers, which then seamlessly progresses them into a lifelong learning program.

Good induction programs are comprehensive, last several years, have clearly articulated goals, and provide a structured and nurturing system focused on professional learning.

Mentors may be very important, but they must be part of an induction process aligned to the district's vision, mission, and structure. For a mentor to be effective, the mentor must be trained and then used in combination with the other components of the induction process.

Every company, every non-profit organization, every locally run store or restaurant has a continuous training program. Teachers are no different. They want training, they want to fit in, and they want their students to learn and achieve. For the most part, education has failed to recognize what industries have always recognized – formalized, sustained training matters.

Even the best educated of new employees need on-the-job training. Despite completing college and medical school, doctors spend years working as hospital residents before entering private practice. Newly elected judges, armed with law degrees and years of experience, attend judicial college before assuming the bench. It stands to reason that teachers, who have earned college degrees and teaching credentials, also have much to gain from on-the-job training.

Demonstration classrooms and networking: other induction components

Richard Ingersoll's research finds that you must have at least seven components if you want to see effective induction. Successful induction programs have these basic components:

• begin with four or five days of workshops before school starts;
• offer a continuum of professional development through systematic training over at least two more years;
• provide study groups in which new teachers can network and build support; commitment, and leadership in a learning community;
• incorporate a strong sense of administrative support;
• integrate a mentoring component into the induction process;
• present a structure for modeling effective teaching;
• provide opportunities for inductees to visit demonstration classrooms.

Effective schools no longer talk about mentoring for survival and retention. They focus on student learning. It does no good to retain a teacher who has no competence in how to achieve student learning. All you have is an ineffective, retained teacher in perpetual survival mode.

This is why induction has evolved. It has now entered its third phase:

• 1980s: mentoring for survival and retention;
• 1990s: induction for professional development;
• 2000s: induction for specific skill performance and contributor to a learning community.

Effective induction programs center on ‘performance-based classrooms'. They have identified the components and elements their new teachers are expected to be 'proficient' in by the end of year three. The goal of their induction program is to create 'performance classrooms' that mirror those components/elements. The performance classrooms would be very ‘skill specific'.

In April, a report by Susan Wynn was presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), ‘Principal Leadership, School Climate Critical to Retaining Beginning Teachers'. It said:

There is no relationship between mentoring support and a teacher's decision to remain at the school or in the school district, even though the teachers reported being generally satisfied with the mentoring program.

Treating only a single aspect of the structure (meaning mentoring only) is unlikely to have a long-term positive effect on teacher retention.

Beginning teachers are more likely to remain in the profession if they are satisfied with their principal's leadership and with the school climate.

Principals need to develop a multi-faceted (comprehensive) design to schools that teachers want to teach in, such as having a learning community where teachers are valued participants.

The efficacy of comprehensive induction

But there is good news and data that supports the efficacy of comprehensive induction. The Islip Public Schools, of Long Island, New York, have a comprehensive, coherent, and sustained three-year induction program. They state that their comprehensive induction program is the reason that 93 per cent of their students in the school year 2004-2005 earned a New York state Regent's diploma, up from 34 per cent in the school year 1992-1993. A Regent's diploma is granted to those students who take a rigorous curriculum and pass a series of tests.

The director of this program is Linda Lippman, and details of her work can be seen at www.newteacher.com/pdf/NYSAFLT_Journal.pdf.

New teachers need three to seven years in the field to reach proficiency and to maximize their students' performance. Once on the job, all beginning teachers must learn to teach to established standards, evaluate the effects of their instruction on student performance, use student achievement data for planning and curriculum, tailor instruction to address specific learning needs, and learn how to thrive in the culture of the school. This kind of learning can only happen in comprehensive induction.

Comprehensive induction more rapidly develops teachers, moving the skill level of a new teacher to that of a fourth-year teacher within the span of one year. Quality professional development is a sustained, intensive effort to improve teaching and learning. To improve instruction, professional development must be collaborative, long-term, and content-driven. Induction is a coherent part of other well-planned professional development activities.

My own work in looking at successful comprehensive induction programs has found that all effective induction programs have three basic parts: 1) Comprehensive: there is an organization or structure to the program consisting of many activities and many people who are involved. There is a group that oversees the program and rigorously monitors it to be sure that it stays the course towards student learning; 2) Coherent: the various activities and people are logically connected to each other, and; 3) Sustained: the comprehensive and coherent program continues for many years.

In conclusion, mentoring is an excellent process for helping teachers but it is only one process needed to keep and develop good teachers. What we need are structured, sustained, intensive professional development programs that allow new teachers to observe others, to be observed by others, and to be part of networks or study groups where all teachers share together, grow together, and learn to respect each other's work.

References

Wong, Harry (2005). ‘New Teacher Induction: The Foundation for Comprehensive, Coherent, and Sustained Professional Development'. In New Teacher Induction and Mentoring: The state of the art and beyond. Corwin. Available at: www.newteacher.com/pdf/CorwinGalley.pdf.

Citations in this paper can be found as references in this article.

 

Dr Harry K. Wong, Ed.D. is a former high school teacher and is currently an educational consultant specializing in developing effective teachers. He and his wife, Rosemary, are authors of The First Days of School. He and his wife are new teacher advocates.

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