Explore

22nd February 2025

Aims of the workshop

The following were the aims of this first meeting on MMM 2025:

welcome and support the induction of the new members of MMM

consolidate and build on the existing relationships

revisit the group goals

discuss mentor roles in the context of a mentor’s introductory mentorial

focus on the mentor’s educator role in the context of using SIRP (Systematic Informed Reflective Practice, aka The Five Steps)

build on mentors’ existing knowledge about mentoring through a focus on pedagogical listening

organise the logistics for the start of the project

Group goals

We looked at our 2024 MMM group goals and suggested the following (admittedly ambitious!) refinement (see additions in yellow below):

Learning through collaboration (to include, going forward, colleagues teaching subjects other than English, retired/international/private language school/university colleagues), sharing (including about members’ professional interests beyond mentoring, e.g. how to put together a successful Erasmus application, what we can learn from other disciplines, e.g. psychotherapy, etc.), fun, emphatic and patient support which develops emotional intelligence, reflection and tech (including social media) to self-motivate and make a difference in education (e.g. at a policy level) and society. Also see

Professional standards for teachers⁠

⁠

Mentor roles

Malderez and Bodoczky (1999), outline the following mentor roles:

educator (scaffolding teacher learning)

model (demonstrating professionalism)

acculturator (helping mentees to integrate into the target professional culture)

sponsor (suggesting suitable contacts or resources) and

supporter (providing safe spaces for learning in which emotions can be vented).

The group reflected on the roles the participants in mentor role adopted during the introductory mentorial, catching up the new colleagues on what the roles mean in context.

Introductory mentorial

Below are the suggested steps for the first, introductory mentorial with a mentee:

Step:

Things to consider:

Informal chat

Who is the mentee as a person/teacher? What’s their school (culture) like? What are their roles? What’s a day in their professional life like? What autonomy do they have?

Goal-setting

What makes them tick in the profession? What do they seek to change? Why has the mentee chosen to engage in mentoring? What, in concrete terms, are they hoping to achieve working together?

Ways of working together

Confidentiality Judgement-free environment Mentee-led learning, informed by context and theory, with 10-20% mentor talking time (but mentor actively listens throughout and considers how best to help) aka SIRP: “Knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle” No observations Availability for mentorials (time and place) Noticing

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Enacting the mentor roles, mentors are well-placed to support the development of a colleague in safe, non-judgemental spaces, with the mentee directing their own learning in systematic and informed ways, and the mentor supporting as and when.

The big MMM picture

To expand on the kind of mentoring MMM supports and why, here’s an excerpt from a study on mentoring (Oncevska Ager and Wyatt, 2019: 108):

Learning mentoring is not straightforward, though (Wyatt & Arnold, 2012), and tensions can arise when mentors have the dual role of supervising (Hobson & Malderez, 2013). Indeed, much supervisory behaviour seems incompatible with mentoring, particularly when this is directive (Gebhard, 1984); directive supervision, which is often insensitive and overwhelming, involves much telling. [...]

Telling, in mentors as well as supervisors, can be problematic. If the mentor is “revealing readily and/or too often his/her judge- ments and evaluations of the mentee's planning and teaching (e.g. through ‘comments’, ‘feedback’, advice, praise, criticism)” (Hobson & Malderez, 2013, p. 90), this is ‘judgementoring’. Hobson and Malderez warn that not only does judgementoring not support learning, but it can also undermine valuable mentoring relationships, which represent the foundation to successful learning. Judgementoring clashes, then, with one of the mentor's principal functions: to support mentees' ‘learnacy’ (Claxton, 2004), i.e. their skill in taking charge of their own professional learning, rather than depending on continuing external support. Malderez (2015) recommends, therefore, that rather than employing the ‘positive-negative-positive sandwich’ approach to providing comments on teaching, mentors consider the whole person (with their emotions, motivation and cognitions) in offering support.

In many contexts, training in mentoring is not provided, though, and the school-based mentor, perhaps a cooperating teacher, is expected to learn on the job without much guidance. This can be problematic, since, like learning teaching, learning mentoring is a lengthy process. While it has rarely been researched (Orland, 2001), longitudinal studies (e.g. Gilles & Wilson, 2004) do highlight how learning to listen, learning when to offer unconditional support and when to challenge need to be developed with practice and guidance.

Revisiting SIRP

The workshop continued with a demo of a mentorial using SIRP (Systematic Informed Reflective Practice, aka The Five Steps - see the protocol in

the handout

⁠

) (Malderez, 2024). Listen to

the recording

⁠

of the 18-minute mentorial, with Elena in the role of a mentor and Jovana in the role of a (particularly agentic!) mentee.

The group then practised SIRP in pairs or small groups. SIRP is the staple mentoring protocol that we’ll be using on the project - there’s never an end to practicing the skills of patient and focused listening coupled with gentle guidance!

Pedagogical listening

In the context of SIRP, we discussed the ‘invisible’ work of listening that mentors do. To use a swan metaphor, mentors may appear calm and forever in control on the surface, but they do some mad pedalling under the surface!

So, good mentors listen. In fact, good mentors spend 80-90% of their time actively listening. This is because when mentees speak, it has the power to reveal confusion in their understanding and help them revise their thinking. The mentor’s job is to help mentees (a) identify any confusion to work with or (b) process the confusion they identified themselves. Every teacher, regardless of their experience, is bound to experience confusion in their practice - it’s a matter of being open to learning from it. Chatting to a mentor is one way to go about it.

Mentees may make their confusion visible at Step 1 of SIRP through their language (e.g. not sure, seemed, surprised) or behaviour (gestures, wavering intonation), so it’s very important for mentors to listen carefully to help the mentee identify their focus. We talked about different kinds of pedagogical listening, as outlined by English et al. (2023):

empathic, i.e. listening to the mentee as a human being (e.g. I’m hearing you’re stressed, am I understanding you?)

educative, i.e. helping the mentee identify their focus (e.g. So, you seem to be struggling with _________. What is it about this topic that is bothering you and why?)

self-reflective, i.e. responding to unpredictable feedback from the mentee (e.g. You took my by surprise there. Let me have a think and I’ll get back to you)

generative, i.e. listening with an open mind to what emerges from the conversation organically, without imposing one’s own mentoring ‘agendas’ (e.g. So, you say _________ and _________ are the most likely explanations for what happened. What makes you think so?).

As suggested above, on this project we’re not interested in evaluative listening (which may be the most common kind of listening in education!), which focuses on ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, because it’s been shown to block reflective inquiry because of its focus on surface solutions (English et al., 2023).

Project logistics

We agreed on and/or organised the following:

Project to officially start from 17th March, though fine for colleagues to start earlier if they are available; colleagues in the role of ‘mentees’ to reach out to their allocated ‘mentors’, please - see

Mentor-mentee pairings

⁠

Pre-service teachers will be getting in touch with their mentors for 3-4 bi-weekly Five Steps conversations (preceded by an introductory mentorial) in the period March - May 2025. Many thanks for supporting them in making their first steps in teaching and reflection!

Project format: occasional meetings (two face-to-face over 2025, the rest online) in between weekly hands-on mentoring practice

Current mentors will support 2-3 colleagues (pre- and/or in-service teachers), using the Noticing application as an assistant for the more time-consuming tasks, e.g. reflection. This means that a mentor with two mentees will offer support with reflection to one mentee per week, while the other mentee chats with Noa in Noticing (more on this soon!); the mentees then alternate in the week that follows. The mentor will have oversight over their mentees’ work in Noticing and will build on that when they meet up in real time, face-to-face or online. Getting help from Noa with supporting reflection will create more headspace in mentors for their other mentor roles: model, support, acculturator and sponsor. This arrangement will result in everyone mentoring or being mentored (by a human or in Noticing) once a week. We will be checking in as a group occasionally; to start with, we’ll get together after the first 4 weeks of engaging in mentoring.

Mentors to start by using the

Introductory mentorial⁠

and proceed to use SIRP to start with (see SIRP protocol in

the handout

⁠

), before being exposed to other mentoring protocols, e.g. lesson planning, end-of-semester reflection, etc. More on this soon!

The language of the mentorials can be whichever the participants decide; at the end of each mentorial, mentees fill in a mentorial record sheet in English - see

Mosaic⁠

⁠

Attendees received a copy of the

2024 MMM publication

⁠

(those who were not able to join us this time can collect their copy next time we meet up as a group); some colleagues kindly took copies of the publication to distribute in their regions and have started pinning those

locations

⁠

- looking forward to seeing the rest of the pins on the board soon!

Participants’ reactions

Wonderful experience; exchanging ideas; learning from others’ experiences; sharing thoughts and knowledge; blessed to be part

I’ve experienced very positive atmosphere and I’m sure this will have positive impact on my professional development. I was happy to see my teacher Elena Oncevska.

Excitement. Perserverance

Sharing ideas and different experiences; gaining personal and professional development

The mentor sesion provided valuable guidance, reinforcing key learning points and inspiring further growing.

I liked: practice; collaboration. I expect: new experience, new professional opportunities

Mentoring: A big word! Implicates responsibility, reflection, self-reflection, being able to guide without guiding! Tough and interesting job!

I enjoyed the session and learned the power of active listening, which I connect to emotional intelligence. I try to be a mentor while teaching and I think I lack some skills on guiding students properly, so this project will help me a lot. Using AI to help our learning through Noticing is something I want to try and share with many teachers.

I love the creativity and prompts you use. I think mentors and mentees can co-create great things.

This session contributed in learning new activities and acquiring new knowledge.

Thank you for your experience, it was inspiring! <3

Met some nice people; hope to get encouraged and refresh my methodology of teaching; swapped numbers; exchanged experience

Problems with the hearing?

I would like some more ‘mingling’ time! :)

Loved it! <3

It was totally new experience. An inspiring one! Thank you xoxo

‘Learnacy’, ‘Judgementoring’. I could listen to you all day! Thank you!

It was an exciting experience entering this project as a mentor. It believe my valuable experience of being mentored will aid me a lot in the process of becoming a good mentor and role model!

Everything was cool, clear and interesting. I liked working with a mentor, consulting and finding resolutions.

Great experience, looking forward to working with my mentees!

Reflective

It was fantastic! Looking forward to sharing experiences with other teachers and improving myself as one. <3

I’d like to discuss more about provided curriculum.

It was great experience, but I think I need more experience about this!!!

Everything was great!

Very informative and enjoyable! ;)

Effective, informative, vibrant, educative, promising

All was clear, I felt successful and I’m glad there was coffee! :)

It was a great pleasure to meet again with old mentors and with new ones. We exchanged our ideas and collaborated in groups.

Motivating, developing

I was a better mentor this time. :) It was great to see ‘old’ and new faces!

This session made me more aware of what I have learnt the previous year. I used my knowledge, I’m proud of it.

It was a pleasure to switch roles and be in the role of a mentor for the first time in my career. P. S. Can’t wait for the next meeting

Keeping connected: WhatsApp

For more immediate communication in the group, please join the following

WhatsApp group

⁠

Follow-up Zoom Q&A session

On Sunday, 9th March, and on Monday, 10th March, we offered Q&A sessions in Zoom for colleagues who missed the face-to-face meeting. The discussions in these sessions resulted in updates in

Group goals⁠

and in

Project logistics⁠

(see additions in pink).