Nurturing the nurturers: How the Mentor- Mentee Program supports teacher development

by Shipra Bhartiya

Teachers are supposed to be the know it all's; nurturers, enablers, innovators, caretakers. They are constantly changing themselves and their teaching and learning styles, as per the changing context. The sudden shift to online schooling in the wake of the pandemic, is evidence of the steep learning curve that the teacher community is relentlessly trudging on.

However, while ensuring that each child imbibes the values of life- long learning, sometimes teachers’ own development, as an educator, faces too many breakers and takes a back seat. This isn’t limited to the new normal but is always a struggle for a teacher.

How should the ever- shrinking day hours should be utilized? On my student’s development or mine? That brings me to a pertinent question- Whose responsibility is the development of teachers?

The leadership team of any school usually has the roles and responsibilities listed: school results, extravagant events, visibility on social platforms and teachers’ welfare, not necessarily in the same order. However, most progressive schools have realized that teachers’ development and growth have a widespread impact on our future leaders and change-makers.

Simply put, teachers maketh a school.
And so, for teachers’ professional development, most schools have a ‘Professional Development Calendar’. This usually involves a session with an external resource once every 3 months; teachers get a certificate, and they move on! Most schools follow a pre-defined set of ‘trainings’ which have no real connection with the actual needs of teachers/students/school. CBSE mandated trainings rarely taken into account what the teacher already knows, the unique learning environment of the school and its goals.

However, there are other ways, more scientific in their approach, that can bring better results and satisfaction to the teachers and the organization.

What worked for me — The Mentor-Mentee Program

Mentor-mentee programs have always been considered a very ‘corporate’ approach. It’s an approach where a mentor, who has vast knowledge, experience and a past record of excellence, guides a mentee to contribute effectively towards organizational goals.

My school has been adapting the mentor mentee program for some years. I as a mentor, can vouch for the impact and the success of such a program, in a school where there are always too many tangents to focus on. I have seen how guided intervention helps a teacher in crossing every milestone in her development journey. Some of the mentees that I worked with showed more than expected movement on the learning curve. Their growth was validated by the feedback from their students, colleagues and parents too.

In these times where we educators, are personalizing the learning experiences for every learner, don’t you think us teachers can benefit from a personalized learning approach to empower ourselves?

It is proven that starting from the point where a learner is, in this case where the teacher is, builds in intrinsic motivation. What better than a teacher curating her/his own path of development!,

She/he knows the goals they want to achieve and know where they will need support. For the leadership team too- it is a win win situation! They will have intrinsically motivated teachers working towards developing their skills and the leadership team has their work done! Instead of focusing on all, suppose, 50 teachers at a go, they can create a differential frameworks, wherein each teacher’s needs are catered to. Isn’t it easier for the leadership team too to focus on maybe newcomers or some teachers who really need the support. And of course every teacher, instead of sitting through every workshop with no takeaways, looks forward to deepening her/his understanding in a focus area of their choosing!!

I strongly recommend such a program as it allows each teacher to work at their own pace to achieve what they decide as their goal. I am hoping that this piece will guide many of us to have such personalized development programs for our teacher community.

The Mentor-Mentee Program for Professional Development of Teachers

Are you ready to be a mentor? That question might overwhelm some of us. Being a mentor is not an easy task. Jack Welch says in his book Winning: When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. And a mentor is a leader in true spirit, without the display of medals. A good mentor fades in the background. All the efforts, time and strategies are for the development of the mentee. The success of the program would be visible only in the practices of the mentee and in the effectiveness of the teaching- learning transactions of the mentee. The Mentor needs to forget about his/her biases, ego, and personal ambitions. The mentee is the king of the program. So if you feel you are ready to hand-over the stage to another, you might be ready to be a mentor.

The program is a systematic approach with well-defined stages and outcomes. I, as a mentor, start with designing a development plan for a mentee keeping the following points in mind:

Stage 1: Preparatory: Lay the ground work

It is important to understand that at this stage nothing in written in stone. This is the pre implementation stage. Here, the goal is for the mentor to be ready for the program, before the mentor and mentee meet. How? Collect background details of the mentee by speaking to past colleagues, looking at the mentee’s past records and portfolio.

The next step involves the mentor creating a rough framework for the program. Ideally, this framework could be a broad outline of the plan, with various options and an expected time duration to achieve the goal(s) set.:

This framework is designed keeping in view the background details of the mentee. .Remember, it will be different for each mentee, given that each mentee will have a different background, with different needs and aspirations. Be okay with this rough plan undergoing changes as you get to know your mentee(s), their needs, and challenges better!

Next, based on the above information, the mentor decides the modes of supporting the mentee: Options might include:

• One on one conference for reflections
• Class observations of the mentee
• Co-teaching
• Sharing of resources
• Feedback on lesson plans
• Co-observing other classes

Stage 2: Mentor is not a quick fix doctor. Spend time in understanding the mentee.

It’s rightly said that children learn from people they like. This quote holds true for adults too. Building a rapport and trust between the mentor and mentee will lay the stepping stones of the Mentor-Mentee Program. Stephen Covey in his much acclaimed book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, says that to have a Win Win situation, it is important to first understand and then to be understood.

Never be in a rush to fix things. Learn the art of empathic listening.
Don’t pretend to listen when there’s a plan already in your bag for the mentee. Empathic listening gives the mentor accurate, authentic data to work with (Stephen Covey).

To be able to share honestly, the Mentee needs to see the mentor as a person with whom she/he can share his/her insecurities, vulnerabilities, and failures without any fear of judgement. This might require the mentor to be vulnerable too in front of the mentee. Have that informal chat over coffee, talk about Sunday afternoon and laugh at silly jokes.

Have patience. Build confidence and trust in the relationship.
Many of the beginning sessions with the mentees are just being used in getting to know each other. I feel as a mentor, it is very important to be encouraging and neutral in one’s disposition, tone and body language. These meetings many a times would be about us laughing about mistakes I had made when I started as a teacher, how I tried something last week and it didn’t work out. A profound learning I’ve had as a mentor, is that a lot depends on my beliefs about failure. Do you give space to your mentees to fail and have conversations about it? Do you see failure a s a part of any journey? Is failure an option or an essential part of any learning journey? Answer these questions for yourself. It helps in building a relationship with the mentees.

After many such sessions, one of my mentees shared that she found it difficult to take feedback positively. She felt depressed if she was given suggestions for improving her work. I realized that she was very insecure about her own domain knowledge. So, whenever she was asked to reflect, she always felt that she had done her best. Therefore, we started with deepening her content knowledge, first, so that she would gain confidence. Also, I started sharing my ‘even better ifs’ with her regularly. ‘Even better ifs’ refers to things I could have done to make that specific task of mine a success. Eg: It would have been better if I had made homogenous groups instead of heterogeneous.

Slowly, she started seeing that there’s nothing wrong with constructive feedback. When I reflected on my journey with this mentee, I realized that her sharing this belief of not being able to work on feedback, was her entrusting me with her vulnerabilities. It was her way of seeking support and it was up to me to shrug that off or use it as an opening to this beautiful journey with her.

I have worked with different teachers as my mentees. There was a time when one of my mentees had a huge upheaval in her personal life. The mentee was in shock and denial, but I could see that she was trying her best to put up a professional façade. “What will be my role in such a situation? The aforesaid teacher had a strong sense of self -respect. So I couldn’t go and ask where she wanted help because I knew she wouldn’t agree to my help. I knew this about her because I had done enough preliminary study about the mentee and knew her likes and dislikes. I instinctively realized that the best way to support her would be to give her some time and space. I started providing her support in a professional space where I could see she was struggling: class management. I would try to be in her class to just support her unobtrusively, quietly talking to students and helping in the task assigned. I did not expect nor push the mentee for giving me the expected results, as far as teaching and learning goes.

I doubt if the mentee realized what I was trying to do. But slowly I started seeing the results. She settled down, emotionally and mentally. Her interactions with students in her class became more productive. She began seeing different learning groups in her class which drove her to plan comprehensively. This less intrusive action helped only because I understood the mentee and her nature. Anything direct like showing her exemplars of different strategies that can be used for class management, giving her pointers for class management or asking her to reflect at that point of time might have been rejected by her.

What you need to understand about your mentee:
Understanding the goals and beliefs of a mentee are most important for improving the educational processes. Mentee’s beliefs about students’ learning, motivation are the major influencing factors. Pajares(1992) acknowledges that the main weakness of educational beliefs is that these are context-free and broad. Pajares mentions four main categories of educational beliefs, namely, teacher efficacy (affecting student performance); epistemological beliefs (regarding knowledge); teacher’s or students’ performance (regarding the different motivational spheres), and self-efficacy (confidence when performing a task). Understand where your mentee stands with each of these beliefs. You never know, the mentor might see that the beliefs of the mentee are not aligned with the organizational beliefs.

Prepare your anecdotes based on:

· Strengths of the mentee: It is important to observe the mentee, through conversations and the preparatory stage, what are their strengths, both, personal and instructional. Eg: personality strengths can be strong verbal communication skills whereas instructional strength might be a willingness to try new strategies. A teacher is one of the few professionals who takes their complete personality to their professional space. Other professions might require one to don a cloak of being a ‘professional’ to cover certain personality traits. A teacher needs to be emotionally, socially and physically invested in their teaching and learning. Thus, understanding the mentee as a person and as a professional would give the mentor deep insights about where the mentee is coming from.

· Challenges for the mentee: Again, the mentor has to make a note of personal and instructional challenges. The mentor might realize that certain personal struggles of the mentee are lending to the challenges in the instruction space too. Eg: Let’s say the pace of a lesson needs to be adjusted as per the students’ of the class. On probing, the mentor finds that the mentee feels overwhelmed by her household responsibilities since she lacks organizational skills.

Here I would like to point out two diverse views about the mentor mentee process. One view is that this process is purely and only about guiding professionally. The time is limited. Use it for the professional development.

Another view is that the mentor is a guide and a counsellor too. Does that mean that the mentee can keep bringing in his/her personal problems to the mentor and the mentor has to provide a solution for every kind of challenge? It can be overwhelming.

I, personally, resonate with the second belief. I do think that the trust and confidence in the relationship manifests in the personal space. However, it is true that the relationship is guided by certain professional requirements. The main goal of the process is to increase the mentee’s instructional level. It doesn’t mean that the mentor be a stone faced person without any empathy. Do give that comfort of voicing out such concerns but also create boundaries. Create a set of essentials with the mentee. The mentor should share her challenges and her limitations. Listen and politely direct the mentee towards the appropriate person for guidance on the personal front. There is no harm in laying down the rules which would make the whole process more effective.

Straight from a Mentee:
Until last year, I was going through a challenging phase which started impacting my mental & physical health. I was unable to focus on my personal and professional front. I needed someone who could just listen to me.

This is when my mentor advised me to meet a Counselor. I was a little apprehensive about taking this step but she made me believe that talking to an expert will help me cope up with challenges and help me in both personally and professionally.

Talking to my mentor & my counselor helped me set up smaller goals. They helped me become more reflective about my thoughts and actions. Keeping my trust intact, it not only gave me a purpose, but a deep self-knowledge and the ability to deal with my challenges.

Stage 3: Creating a development action plan

A developmental plan typically includes what, how and when of the development journey. Plan with the mentee. Where does he/she stand today as per the competence framework of the organization?

Some of the schools might not have a competence framework. Don’t panic. As an organization, find out what are the MUSTS that it is looking for in its teachers. It might be that a school holds maximum participation as a parameter whereas another school might hold completion of a lesson as a high MUST. List down the MUSTS. Ideally, these should have been communicated to the teachers. Every teacher in any school should know what is expected of her/him. These MUSTS become the parameters for designing the plan.

Straight from a Mentee:
“A mentor is not someone who walks ahead of you to show you how they did it. A mentor walks alongside you to show you what you can do.”– Anonymous

This quote beautifully shows my relationship with my mentor. It’s been two years now that I am working with her, why I say working ‘with her’ instead of ‘under her’ because she has always been so approachable and supportive that I was easily able to learn and understand what to do and how to do. She always had an answer to all my wonder questions whether it’s through the reading materials shared on differentiation or conducting mini PDs to help me conduct my classes smoothly. Last year, for differentiation she suggested various strategies which definitely helped in catering to the needs of all my learners. The feedback given by her about each observation was constructive and to the point that I was easily able to reflect and work on getting better. She always questioned me on why I was doing what I was doing but I never felt that I was put on a spot. Completely non-judgmental. It has always been a pleasure to work with her.”

Guide your mentee in setting their targets. Let her/him choose what they want to focus on and do focus on the ‘why’ of their chosen focus area. Knowing the ‘why’ and how it is going to impact students learning is the driving core that is needed for the development journey to be a success.

The development plan needs to have an outline. I feel the following elements should be included in the plan to make it a success:

1. Goal and target of the mentee: The SMART model works the best for goal setting. The mentor helps the mentee in setting realistic goals aligned with what she/he wants to achieve. This ensures the mentee’s ownership to their development journey. This also develops a reciprocal relationship between the mentor and mentee wherein they work collaboratively to achieve the set goals. The goal can be further broken down into smaller focus areas that the mentor and mentee decide together to reach the goal: It can be just one, eg: increase student voice in the classroom or it can be a set of 2–3 areas. Eg: increase participation in the class, improve attendance and differentiate instructions.
2. Success criteria for the focus area: How would the mentee self-evaluate to monitor her growth? What would show that she has moved up the curve of the chosen focus area? Design the parameters and assessment tools with the mentee. Eg: if the goal was to increase student voice in the classroom, the mentee needs to have a clear picture of what student voice looks like in a classroom.
3. Instructional practices that need to be enhanced to achieve success. Taking the same example further- what are the strategies that the mentee needs to adopt or adapt so that there is students voice? The mentor and mentee might decide that questioning seems to be the best way of doing so or they might decide to create a small council of class leaders to take it forward. The often heard phrase, Less is More, holds true. Don’t try everything and anything It leads to confusion and frustration. Be focused. Master one and then move one.
4. Content knowledge and understanding that needs to be enhanced to be able to move up the chosen curve. The plethora of information that is available to everyone is overwhelming and confusing. The mentor needs to cull out the most effective set of resources and create a folder which includes a varied resource: articles, videos, podcasts. The idea is to give a choice to the mentee to use the resources that she/he finds easiest for them to understand and deepen their knowledge.
5. Intervention strategies (classroom observation, planning support, reflection sessions): Mentor takes the lead here. Once the goal and focus area has been set, what will be the best way for the mentor to intervene. Mentor might decide 30% class observations, 50% one on one discussions, 20% co teaching and balance in reflections. Again, the mentor and mentee might feel the need to change the strategies mid-way, if on evaluation they both feel that the decided way is not bringing the desired results. Just remember that any change needs to be backed by a strong reason and evidence.
6. Feedback process: This is a two-way process. The mentor continuously gives feedback or feed forward, as it is said these days, to the mentee: on classes, plans, instructional strategies. The feed forward needs to be focused on the chosen focus area. A directed well planned intervention on small areas brings in larger impact than focusing on too many aspects. Also, remember, the feedback should be aligned with the success criteria that was defined in step 2. Using the same example of student voice, if I as a mentor is observing a class of my mentee, I might notice 2 to 3 things that might need improvement. But I need to focus on student voice. Over the years, I have realized the sandwich approach that we all use with our students is the best way of giving effective feedback to adults too. Start with a positive comment about the class, use positive language to convey what didn’t work, follow it with 2 to 3 suggestions and close it with an encouraging remark.
   It is equally important for the mentor to take feedback from the mentee. The mentor needs to evaluate and assess if she/he is able to guide the mentee, whether their interventions are giving clarity and paving the way for the mentee or not. Ask for mentee’s suggestions. How can the process become more effective? What would the mentee like to change in the current process?
7. Reflection process: Reflection is not a process that highlights the mistakes of the mentee. The process of reflection is going to be fruitful only if this belief is firmly established between the mentor and the mentee. It is not a fault finding mechanism. Reflective practice is ‘learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self and practice’ (Finlay, 2008)It is a systematic reviewing process which allows the mentee to make links from one experience to the next, making sure that her students make maximum progress. Kolb’s Learning Cycle (1984) highlights reflective practice as a tool to gain conclusions and ideas from an experience.
   Mentor and mentee need to reflect in two phases:
   (i) reflecting in action (when something is happening) and
   (ii) reflecting on action (after something has happened)

Reflection is a cyclical approach that focuses on questioning the mentee’s actions and thoughts. To be able to embed reflections as a part of the routine teaching and learning process is one of the highest achievements that a mentor can help mentee to achieve.

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

8. Time lines: Work backward. Look at the goal realistically and the level of the mentee. Decide the time you both are willing to invest in this journey. Build in regular checks to review the plan. There needs to be an end time or the finish time of the process so that the mentee and the mentor is able to track every step judiciously.

In the beginning of this piece, I had asked a question: Whose responsibility is the development of teachers?

Let me give my purview on this. Most of us will say the organization and the leaders. But is it truly so? Yes, it is the foremost responsibility of the organization leaders to create a culture of continuous learning where there is nothing called failure. It is the responsibility of the leadership to provide as many avenues and platforms for teachers to hone their skills and learn. Provide that space for teacher agency so that each teacher owns their development journey. Yes, it is each and every teacher’s responsibility to empower herself or himself, to learn, relearn and try.

My school has recently launched a Teacher Empowerment plan wherein each teacher has chosen their goals for the session which are in alignment with the school development plan. Teachers have been given a choice of the learning pathway too. Each teacher chooses how she wants to learn: mentor mentee program, through webinars, or small focus groups or independently. Each teacher is aware what would success looks like and has chosen the time frame too. Teachers have then been grouped together as per their choice of learning pathway. Here, you see, the framework has been provided by the leadership but the onus lies completely on the teacher. And that I believe is what is needed for us as a community: the ownership of our own learning. This program is an experiment. But all the essentials are there. Fingers crossed!!

Written By- Shipra Bhartiya

Shipra is a Teaching and Learning Lead at a renowned private school in Delhi NCR. She specialises in Mathematics instruction and is passionate about turning her students into problem solvers.

You can read more of her writing here.