The partnership between school-based mentors and university-based tutors plays an important part in the education of the next generation of teachers. This article shares the findings of a university’s research project seeking to understand both the barriers and enablers to school-based mentors’ professional development. Incidentally, this research project is also supporting the university-based teacher educators’ professional development. During the process, the group adopted seafaring metaphors to describe their work. These have been used throughout this article to assist with navigation. The findings of this research will be used in the further development of support for mentoring and tutoring within the initial teacher education partnership.
Background: A sea of discontent
‘The Importance of Teaching’ (2010), reiterated the important role that school based settings have in the development of new entrants to the profession. As a university-based provider of initial teacher education, we work with around 600 partner schools and settings and were conscious of a wide range of practice and competence among our mentors. We were already in the process of discussing ways of further supporting them when an Ofsted inspection in 2014 tasked us to: “improve the quality of school-based mentoring so that it is all of a consistently high standard”. This required affirmative action resulting in the employment of a consultant. The consultant was commissioned to examine school and university practice across all areas of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) mentoring and quality assurance and the recommendations were as follows:
- The nature and frequency of mentor training and development needs to be reviewed and refreshed, with a particular emphasis on coaching approaches across all phases.
- Consider re-establishing mentoring programmes with the option of accreditation.
- Consider developing a mentor recognition framework.
As far as possible, mentor training or development activities should be distributed to the areas or managed on line.
Complete the pilot for and evaluate the use of a school self-evaluation document as a self- improvement tool, and consider its future use for designation at the beginning of a partnership, giving tiered partnership status to a school.
Review the purpose and operation of area-based meetings in each phase, so that they are better attended and provide a more meaningful experience for mentors, taking into consideration the desire expressed by a number of mentors to be members of a community of practice.
Introducing a framework for mentoring: Constructing the fishing vessel
It was recognised that we had never really provided a benchmark of our expectations for our partner schools. We had a ‘Partnership Agreement’, a contract that was signed by both partners that spoke in broad terms about provision, but nothing about what it should look like in practice. Over a period of months, we developed the ‘Partnership Evaluation Framework’ (PEF) which focused on four areas of the student experience in school:
- Induction
- Professional Development
- The Quality of Coaching and Mentoring
- Working in Partnership