Effective approaches to mentoring: what works and why?

In the session, participants were engaged and represented a range of backgrounds in mentoring (both within Initial Teacher Education and beyond). The project’s findings showed that a range of approaches to mentoring of student teachers are needed in order to be effective and that these need to be tailored according to the mentee-mentor dynamic. The project elicited thick descriptions of experience from participants by requesting them to bring an artefact (object, image or subtitle) which represented effective mentoring to them and discuss this.

This aspect of the project provided interesting and varied data and the use of artefacts as a research tool was heralded as a successful approach for enabling participants to contribute with authority, ownership and confidence in a research project. The same was asked of participants in the session which helped to add to the range of artefacts provided.

Download video transcript 102.4 KB