Mentoring powers professional growth

Mentoring matters in early childhood education and care settings. When effectively implemented, it’s a powerful strategy that can significantly influence an educator’s professional development and growth at any time throughout their career.

But to be successful, a supportive culture and structure are necessary as mentoring is not a one size fits all model.

An effective mentoring program requires leaders to wrap support around the mentoring process. This is backed by a committed culture, specialist training for mentors, and a design that allows positive relationships to develop.

Effective mentoring supports the professional learning of both individuals and the team and leads to positive learning outcomes for children and their families. Successful mentoring for new educators can be extraordinarily beneficial, leading to a lower rate of turnover, boosting the quality of teaching and learning, and ramping up levels of professional satisfaction.

The models for mentoring relationships are varied, ranging from formal to informal through to either the traditional one-to-one approach or a collective approach, such as when an external mentor supports a group of educators in one service. There’s even a business model called reverse mentoring that could be relevant in some settings.

Traditionally in a mentoring relationship, a more experienced person (the mentor) provides a less experienced person (the mentee) with information, support and guidance. Reverse mentoring flips this relationship, so a new educator supports a more experienced educator in pursuit of teaching new skills, knowledge, and understanding.

This structure can bridge the gap between generations in the workforce and can be useful for technology or cultural learning. This approach may also support the development of leadership skills within new team members, build inclusivity and allow a better understanding of different perspectives or cultures within the team.

Understanding mentoring

When defining mentoring, an interesting fact is that the term “mentor” comes from Greek mythology. In “The Odyssey”, Odysseus entrusts the protection and education of his son to one of his dearest friends. The name of that friend? You guessed it: Mentor.

Mentoring is an essential part of the professional development process, providing a valuable pathway to facilitate learning through reflection on personal experience, developing confidence and skills, and dealing with problems in professional relationships.

Mentoring often gets confused with coaching and, while both are supportive, they differ in their approach and methodology. Mentors may use coaching techniques, but the mentoring role is structured to broker access to a range of self-directed learning opportunities, reflection on practice and ongoing support. Coaching is used in a more targeted way and promotes the development of a specific aspect of a professional learner’s practice.

Mentoring is first and foremost a structured learning relationship and, like all relationships requires commitment and effort. It requires a foundation of trust, respect, open and honest communication, flexibility and an understanding of perspectives. This necessitates the allocation of time and resourcing to allow a learning relationship to flourish. Mentoring also needs to be scheduled as education and care settings are often time-challenged.

Expert advice on effective mentoring

Education consultant and former Senior Researcher for New Zealand Council for Education Research, Jenny Whatman, penned an article on mentoring, outlining the following guidelines for setting up and maintaining effective mentoring relationships:

Leaders need to carefully identify and select mentors: it is important that mentors want to do the job, are willing to make their work public, and have the right knowledge, skills and dispositions (for example, they are approachable, non-judgemental and trustworthy)
Mentors need specific and timely education and training, as not all effective teachers make effective mentors: this includes the provision of professional learning and development (PLD) to help them develop their identity and build their knowledge and skills as a mentor
Mentoring partnerships need to be supported by leadership and the wider ECE setting, as many teachers in leadership roles lack the time and resources to mentor others effectively, and leadership support for timetabling, resourcing, release time and PLD is critical to success
Leaders need to ensure that mentees and mentors are carefully matched in terms of both their inter-personal relationship (they need to get along) and their professional relationship (there is some support for matching like with like, especially in relation to having similar teaching philosophies, although others suggest that learning comes from diverse mentor/mentee relationships)
Mentees need to value the mentoring relationship and contribute to it
Roles and responsibilities must be carefully negotiated and agreed, and mentors, mentees, senior leadership and the wider organisation all need to contribute to effective mentoring relationships
As mentor and mentee roles and relationships change and develop over time, partnerships and PLD opportunities need to adjust accordingly

Capturing the organic nature of mentoring, Australian education leader, Rhonda Livingstone, wrote in her article Mentoring Matters:

“Professional growth and development involve change. Mentoring can transform knowledge, skills, behaviours, attitudes and perspectives of mentees and mentors.

Change is not usually linear, being uniquely shaped by the purpose and context. Mentoring generally involves distinct phases:

Getting to know each other and building trust
Goal setting and action planning
Developing professional skills and tracking progress
Evaluating progress and outcomes
Moving forward – either completing the process or returning to Step 2 to repeat the cycle.”

Livingstone highlights that effective communication underpins successful mentoring and essential components include: