Mentor teachers: Coaches or referees?

Abstract

A variety of beginning teacher assistance programs have been implemented in several states in recent years, designed to improve the quality of the induction year experience for beginning teachers. In many of these programs, roles for experienced, skilled teachers have been created to assist beginning teachers during the crucial first year of teaching. The roles these mentor teachers, teacher consultants, school based teacher educators, or peer teachers, as they are variously called in different programs, are expected to play differ from state to state, and sometimes carry conflicting expectations. This article examines several induction year programs, their role expectations for mentor teachers, and the often conflicting nature of these expectations. It proposes joining the concept of mentor teachers for induction programs with that of supervising teachers at the preservice level to create a new role-school based teacher educators-that