Outline The Benefits Of Mentoring

Benefits of Mentoring

Although mentoring process is regarded as a practical endeavor whose main goal rests in helping student teachers grow their professional expertise and form their teacher identity, mentoring role itself still remains unrecognized and undervalued, mostly because some teachers can only see drawbacks in it and are not well-motivated to be a professional mentor. As Lopez-Real and Kwan (2005) maintain, “in order to ensure a healthy sustainability, it is essential to arouse intrinsic drive among the mentoring teachers so that they feel rewarded in achieving professional development through the process of mentoring student teachers” (p. 15). Therefore, it is necessary to outline the major benefits which mentors can seek for while

20), are more fluent in the use of IT and can generate more new and feasible ideas at times (Grisham et al., 2004; Hudson, 2013; Uusimaki, 2013). Some mentors claimed that mentoring has improved their communication skills, problem-solving and building capacity skills, and enhanced their pedagogical knowledge too (Hudson, 2013, p. 781). Moreover, as Lopez-Real and Kwan (2005) maintain, those teachers who do not have student teachers to mentor, lack a chance of seeing themselves from the outside, and thus are less likely to have much introspection (p. 19). This acquired new knowledge from a mentee may also benefit other teachers, as mentors usually share their student teachers’ ideas with colleagues during the meetings, which therefore enriches the school teaching style in a long run (Lopez-Real & Kwan, 2005). Collaboration is also a way for the mentor and the mentee to generate new ideas or teaching solutions, where both sides stimulate each other’s way of thinking, thereby enacting the concept of “transformative learning” (Klinge, 2015, p. 162) and work as a team for the mutual benefit (Lopez-Real & Kwan, 2005, p. 21). Furthermore, as the study by Smith and Nadelson (2016) revealed, 65% of mentor teachers have reported the noticeable changes in their reflective practices, learned

Simpson et al., 2007; Ulvik & Sunde, 2013; Uusimaki, 2013; Young et al., 2005) speculate about the short-term nature of mentoring practices as one of the impediments for mentors' professional development, Smith and Nadelson (2016) reject this belief, by saying that mentoring professional benefits may occur regardless of the “short-term exposure, if the situations require the mentor teacher to engage in observation and reflection” (p. 69). Wang (2001) also adds, that the we should not draw only on one variable, but consider other variables too, such as intentsity of an interaction, place, and the number of topics discussed during the interactions (p. 65). Nonetheless, it can be assumed that as long as the mentors can reflect and observe their mentee’s performace, it yields benefits for both parties, regardless of the duration of