What to expect from your teacher training mentor
During your teacher training year you can expect to be supported by an experienced mentor who is qualified to teach. Time should be set aside for you to meet with them on a regular basis.
Chris Powell has 12 years teaching experience and is a professional mentor and ITT lead for a teaching school alliance. His job, apart from teaching, is to look after and support trainee teachers and NQT’s.
Here, Chris explains what you should expect from your mentor and how to make the most of the time you spend with them…
During your training year, arguably the most influential person in determining how your whole year goes will be your mentor. Here’s why:
Everyday support
Your SCITT or university will teach you the theory of pedagogy but your mentor is the person who teaches you the day-to-day nitty-gritty practicalities of being a teacher.
Consciously or unconsciously your mentor will be a massive influence on the type of teacher you become — with any luck, they’ll be a brilliant professional that you hope to one day emulate. However, they may not be so great — there are teachers out there who grudgingly take on the mentoring role and do a pretty shocking job of it. What you will learn from these mentors is exactly what type of teacher you definitely do not want to become!
Structure
Your mentor probably won’t be getting paid to ‘look after’ you, but they should be given a protected free period to meet with you on a weekly basis. In other words, they shouldn’t be expected to give up their lunchtime or meet with you after school — although many will do this as well.
These meetings should have a solid structure in which targets for next week are set and the previous week’s targets reviewed. You may well team teach alongside your mentor — delivering a short section of a lesson while they do the rest — this is a great way of dipping your toe into teaching alongside an experienced teacher.
Guidance
A good mentor won’t simply say, “don’t do it that way, you should do it like this,” because every teacher is different and has their own approach. A good mentor will ask you, “why did you do it like that and how might you do it differently?” In other words, a good mentor will adopt more of a coaching approach.
Similarly, a good mentor won’t simply give you a load of PowerPoint presentations to teach from but will encourage you to plan your own lessons with their guidance.
However, a mentor is a very busy person and therefore not expected to know when your university deadlines are coming up, or nag you to get your assignments submitted on time. Whilst your mentor should attend the mentor training provided by the SCITT or university (if they don’t there should be a very good reason as this would ring alarm bells for me), they won’t know the details of your training course. It is your responsibility to keep them informed of upcoming deadlines and days that you will be out of school, and to take the minutes in mentor meetings etc.
Professionalism
In my experience, the vast majority of relationships between mentors and their trainees are productive and successful. There obviously needs to remain a professional relationship between the two of you, anything friendlier than this could make things uncomfortable, for example, if your mentor had to pass on any difficult messages to you.
Conversely, the trainee and mentor may have nothing in common and generally not enjoy each other’s company. This can simply be just a fact of life — we should all be able to have effective working relationships with people we don’t get on with — it’s called being a professional.
However, if the working relationship between you and your mentor does break down, what can be done? First, you need to have a conversation with the professional mentor — usually a member of SLT who is paid for their role and as such is ultimately responsible for any teacher training that goes on within the school.
They should be the person you go to with any problems that are not appropriate to discuss with your subject mentor — it will be their job to mediate and try to resolve the situation.
It is also important to note that whilst there is a mentor for each trainee, any member of your department can observe you or give advice and support even if they’re not your ‘official’ mentor — most teachers are more than happy to help.
And finally…
The best advice I can give to any trainee is to take on the guidance you are given and act on it. If you can do this, you will make rapid progress. Experienced teachers have thousands of hours of teaching under their belts and have to try to impart that wisdom to their trainees in just 10 months, therefore a trainee that can take criticism and act on advice will go far.
