Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

This study aimed to identify challenges that pre-service teachers face when developing a learning community within their clinical practice classrooms. Furthermore, it also aimed to identify which strategies pre-service teachers employed during clinical practice to assist in the development of a learning community in the elementary classroom. The findings include the discrepancy between the clinical practice pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy ratings and the implementation according to the supervisors’ reports. The findings also refer to classroom management in the open-ended responses and the post-observation conference discussions.The authors recommend on the infusion of additional classroom management strategies throughout the teacher education program would strengthen the pre-service teachers’ skill set in this critical domain.

This paper is purposed with operationalizing the concept of mentoring as a nuanced approach and attempt to promote the upward trajectories of African-American women in predominantly White institutions (PWIs). The authors struggled as African-American women to balance and decipher the various facets inherent in their respective roles – professor and doctoral student in a PWI – hence a mentor/mentee relationship emerged. This qualitative study explored the effectiveness of traditional and non-traditional mentoring functions for an African-American woman doctoral student aspiring for the professoriate, and the professional advancement of an African-American woman professor, who matriculate in the same PWI.

In this collaborative autoethnography, the authors explored how 14 faculty and administrators of color, identified as emerging leaders within their campus context, experienced mentoring and how these experiences have impacted their leadership development and sense of well-being in the higher education context. In this study, the authors provided evidence of the importance of supportive, developmental professional relationships in the lives of emerging leaders in higher education, especially among people of color. Leaders of color in faith-based higher education identified such relationships, involving psychosocial and career development functions, as fairly limited within their institutional settings.

The purpose of this study was two folded: Firstly, to determine if there was evidence that the additional components increased persistence in teaching, and, secondly, to determine the perceived effectiveness of the required mentor professional learning and the perceived effectiveness of mentoring by the mentees. Findings offer insight for structuring mentor models to increase effectiveness and persistence of teachers and build the capacity of mentors. The findings reveal that providing mentoring for novice teachers is essential to their effectiveness and persistence in teaching. Furthermore, mentees noted that they wanted to have more reciprocal observations and feedback with their mentors and wanted to co-plan instruction for greater effectiveness.