Mentoring Teachers: Supporting Learning, Wellbeing and Retention

Mentoring Teachers: Supporting Learning, Wellbeing and Retention presents a form of nonjudgmental mentoring that is supported by both practical and theoretical evidence. The author puts forward that mentoring must be non-judgmental and based on trust and understanding where mentees are scaffolded throughout, with mentors taking the five roles of a supporter, an acculturator, a model, a sponsor and an educator to help mentees develop as informed reflective practitioners, who are confident and capable of making their own decisions and judgements. The book has ten chapters preceded by an introduction. The author starts her book with some clarifications of her views of teaching and mentoring, and how she sees her professional identity as a teacher, a mentor as well as a researcher in the area. The first few pages set the scene for a reader-friendly book by avoiding jargon and through an accessible writing style. One of the key ideas presented in the introduction, and that is referred to frequently in the book is Systematic Informed Reflective Practice (SIRP). Another core idea that the author asserts is that mentors need to analyse the features of mentoring in their contexts. Context is defined in this book as “People, Place and (point in) Time” (Wedell and Malderez, 2013, p.15). According to the author, the contextual analysis can help mentors identify features of their contexts that can facilitate or impede mentoring. After preparing readers for the five roles of a mentor by elucidating the conceptual meaning of mentoring in this book, and by considering context, the author discusses each role in a sperate chapter. The book shows how a mentor can support a mentee throughout a mentoring programme. Active listening is a key skill that a mentor needs to possess to effectively support mentees. This skill is highlighted by the author where she draws on the levels of listening in coaching by citing van Nieuwerburgh (2020), and adding her own observations and commentaries to each level. One level that stands out is that a mentor needs to reflect back to what a mentee has said by paraphrasing and rechecking their understanding. It could be noticed that the nonjudgmental listening is a joint feature in mentoring and coaching as well as in Cooperative Development (CD) where a listener in CD is labeled as an understander to reflect the non-judgmental nature of such a role (see Edge,1992).