Better together: Enhancing professional learning about mentoring through research and collaboration

In this research working paper, we report on one strand of our research project, Mentoring in Primary ITE, which aimed to identify, enhance and disseminate effective mentoring practice. Our focus here is on mentors’ professional learning, and how this has shaped our current mentor training. We share data that enabled us to address one of our research questions, ‘What helps mentors to develop their expertise?’, together with our reflections on the value of working collaboratively in participatory research to enhance practice.

Our partnership approach is aligned with ‘educative mentoring’ (Feiman-Nemser, 2001), and is premised on a vision of classrooms as complex sites of enquiry, where student teachers, mentors and academics co-construct knowledge about teaching and learning. Our close-to-practice research, which began in 2023, has involved asking mentors about their professional learning, as well as involving mentors in the research process, through enquiry into their own and others’ practice. We share three strands of our collaborative work, which have enhanced our own professional learning, and have impacted upon our partnership policy and practice.

First, inspired by Stanulis et al.’s (2019) mentor study groups, we reflect on how working with mentors in special interest groups has supported powerful professional learning for school-based mentors and university-based lecturers. Second, we share what we have learned about the development of mentor expertise through our analysis of questionnaire and interview data. Third, we reflect on the value of co-analysing interview transcripts with our mentors. These three strands have supported our own learning and enabled us to produce a researchinformed mentor toolkit to support mentors’ professional learning, which has become embedded as a strong element of our partnership practice.