The Terrors of Judgementoring and the Case for ONSIDE Mentoring for Early Career Teachers

Abstract

In this chapter I examine institution-based mentoring of early career school and college teachers. Research has shown that such mentoring can have a range of powerful, positive impacts on mentees, mentors, schools, colleges and education systems; yet, unless appropriate conditions for mentorship are created, mentoring can be ineffectual and even harmful. After defining the key concepts and outlining the research underpinning the chapter, I outline common ingredients of successful and effective mentoring for early career teachers in primary and secondary (K-12) schools and what in England we call ‘further education’ (FE).1 Then, I argue that various failures at institutional and policy levels have contributed to inappropriate enactments of mentoring which have stunted professional learning and development (PLD) and had a deleterious effect on the well-being of many early career teachers. In doing so, I present new evidence from the UK and other international contexts on the nature, reach, causes and consequences of ‘judgementoring’ (Hobson and Malderez, 2013), a particular enactment of mentoring found to be detrimental to early career teachers’ professional learning, development and well-being. Lastly, I offer a new researchinformed mentoring framework, called ONSIDE Mentoring serve the needs of early career teachers – and the schools and colleges in which they are situated – far more effectively than existing approaches to mentoring deployed in the UK and elsewhere. Developing earlier definitions by Malderez (2001), Hobson et al. (2009a) and Hobson and Malderez (2013), I define mentoring in this context as, that I consider would a one to one relationship between a relatively inexperienced teacher (the mentee) and a relatively experienced teacher (the mentor), which aims to support the mentee’s learning, development and well-being, and their integration into the cultures of both the organisation in which they are employed and the wider profession.