Critical reflection for Mentors

 

The imperative for professionals to critically reflect on the effectiveness of their everyday work is a widely understood foundation for continuously improving practice. This is no less the case for those in mentoring roles, who are most often working on a range of other tasks in difficult practice environments. Mentoring involves being appropriately empathetic, providing supportive (as opposed to directive) guidance and to providing professional (and sometimes even more personal) advice. This role inevitably involves making a large number of significant evaluative decisions in providing such mentoring to pre-service teachers.

 

However, what are the core assumptions that we are use in our roles as a mentor? Most often they are largely intuitive or unconscious, particularly as we gain more experience in the field (which encourages to rely more on our developed intuition drawn from previous experiences).

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It is therefore important that we periodically hunt those assumptions that underpin our practice. This is important because it can broaden our perspective, challenge our (often habitual) responses and allow us to investigate new possibilities.

 

One framework that can help us hunt these assumptions that underpin our approach to supervision is that of Brookfield’s (1999) critically reflective lenses. Although this framework was originally designed to reflect on teaching, it equally has application to the reflective work of mentoring.

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The essence of this framework is that:

 

·         understanding our work from different perspectives (including better understanding our own experiences with mentoring), which can prompt a broader understanding of the work we are doing; and

·         confronting the tensions (and sometimes contradictory pressures) of the mentoring role, that can help us think through better ways of managing, developing and advocating in this role

 

This framework advocates looking at mentoring through four distinct lenses:

 

·         our self (or the effect of our own learning autobiography as a learner-mentor)

·         our pre-service teachers (whose voice can tell us much about the effectiveness of what we do)

·         our peers (who can disrupt our certainties and introduce new ways of seeing)

·         literature on mentoring practice (that can broaden our understanding of what we do and how we can most effectively do it)