Boreen, J., Johnson, M. K., Niday, D., & Potts, J. (2000). Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Guiding, Reflecting, Coaching

	Boreen, J., Johnson, M. K., Niday, D., & Potts, J. (2000). Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Guiding, Reflecting, Coaching. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. Pages xii + 130 $ 27.95 CAN (approx. $20 US)     ISBN 1-57110-309-0. Reviewed by Michele Jacobsen University of Calgary September 27, 2003 Many of us can remember how important good mentors were to our early professional development as teachers. Mentoring helps student and beginning teachers make the transition from novice to professional. Research also indicates that effective mentoring reduces new teacher attrition by one-half or more (Odell, 1992). From the start, the authors of Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Guiding, Reflecting, Coaching convince us that good mentoring is vital for health of the teaching profession and for quality learning environments for children. In each chapter, the authors provide both successful and unsuccessful scenarios and examples in order to illustrate the power of mentoring relationships to encourage or stifle a novice teacher’s early professional development. Each of the eight chapters in the book are framed by a key question and include narrative scenarios that bring key ideas and topics to life. For example, two dramatic examples of the positive and the negative interactions that can characterize early mentoring relationships provide the introduction to the first chapter, entitled “Why do I want to be part of a mentoring experience?” In the first scenario, Melanie, a first year teacher, thanks her mentor for all of the support and encouragement throughout the year, and her mentor thanks her for making teaching exciting all over again. In the second scenario, Kevin, a student teacher, is very discouraged by the latest confrontation with his cooperating teacher. Kevin doesn’t know when and if he is doing anything right. When he approaches his cooperating teacher for advice, Kevin is told that if he cannot figure it out by himself, he doesn’t belong in teaching. Clearly, communication has broken down between a student teacher and cooperating teacher. The authors use narrative throughout the book to explore the nature of professional dialogue and teaching scenarios that involve veteran teachers, beginning teachers, university educators, and students of all ages. The first four chapters of Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Guiding, Reflecting, Coaching focus on the mutual benefits of good mentoring, the importance of mentoring for quality teaching, and how to prepare to be an effective mentoring guide and coach. In an overview of mentoring in chapter two, Boreen, Johnson, Niday, & Potts (2000) describe how our expectations about teaching apprenticeship have shifted from the novice watching and observing the expert in order to emulate “best practice”, to encouraging the beginning teacher to “be an active participant, inquirer, and critical thinker” (p. 9). The mentor’s role has also changed from being the problem solver and advice giver to being more of a “questioner, listener, and model for reflective thinking” (p. 9). I remember my own student teaching experiences fondly because of the wise counsel of my mentor, Anne. A high school English teacher for 25 years, Anne didn’t bombard me with curriculum guides, photocopied plans and practical tips on class management. Instead, she supported me in forming good relationships with students, guided my instructional planning thoughtfully and coached me to read widely in our discipline. Anne also expected me to teach with other teachers in the English department so that I was exposed to diverse perspectives, styles and approaches to teaching and learning. As I read the first four chapters of Mentoring Beginning Teachers, I was reminded over and over again why Anne was such an effective mentor. As suggested in chapter three, entitled “How Do I Prepare To Be A Mentoring Guide?, Anne helped me to learn about the culture of the school, assisted me with developing rapport with students, and provided me with the freedom to experiment. Anne modeled excellent teaching strategies, invited professional conversations about practice, and encouraged reflective writing. Boreen, et al. (2000) suggest that “mentors help beginning teachers analyze their classroom practice, think about what they do in the classroom and why, and point beginning teachers in creative directions so they can discover how to develop effective student learning conditions” (p. 24). Anne watched and listened carefully while I was teaching her students, nudged me towards useful resources and experts in the school, and helped me to reflect upon my developing practice. As recommended by Boreen, et al. (2000), in chapter four on preparing to be a mentoring coach, Anne was able to “make the implicit explicit by explaining the theory behind her practice” (p. 36) in ways that helped me to develop a deeper understanding of what was happening in the classroom. Anne’s approach to teaching has held me in good stead for the past eleven years – design meaningful work for students, challenge learners to go further than they might go alone, and always be very well prepared so that you can hear and respond thoughtfully to emergent learning opportunities. Anne was also an important catalyst for my ongoing reflection on practice. Boreen, et al. (2000) claim that “in the classroom, teasing apart a perplexing situation or problem and seeking a solution or an explanation guides and propels reflective inquiry” (p. 69). Anne’s approach to mentoring gave me the courage to mentor others into the profession using inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2001). In this sense, student and mentor teachers learn by generating local knowledge of practice by working within the contexts of inquiry communities to theorize and construct their work and by connecting it to larger social, cultural, and political issues (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2001). Mentoring student teachers in schools can be one of the hardest and most rewarding things we do as university educators. Chapters five to eight of Mentoring Beginning Teachers explore questions about helping with classroom management challenges, developing reflective practices, supporting ongoing professional development and growth, and potential issues in mentoring relationships. I found these chapters immediately applicable to my own teaching practice, and for supporting the development of effective mentoring relationships between student and mentor teachers. My role is to facilitate a gradual and graduated, reflective and rewarding learning experience for the student teacher, and also to support mentor teachers in the design of meaningful experiences for the student teacher. Mentoring Beginning Teachers makes explicit several relationship building and sustaining strategies, such as mentoring through conferring and questioning, mentoring through mirroring, and mentoring through modeling reflection, that mentor teachers and university educators can use to coach beginning teachers to “think like a teacher”. These approaches enable mentor teachers to support student teachers in looking beyond the immediate classroom environment to see the big picture of learner engagement and success. Student teachers often approach the extended field experience with two big concerns; classroom management and student assessment. In chapter 5, entitled “How do I help with classroom management challenges?”, Boreen, et al. (2000) investigate principles of management from simplicity and consistency in classroom policies, to dealing with special students and classroom disruptions. The authors explore relevant classroom management issues in a thoughtful and thought provoking manner, and provide strategies and activities that are responsive and flexible rather than prescriptive. Chapter six, entitled, “How Do I Encourage Reflection?”, is likely the most useful chapter in the entire book. Reflection is framed as a sense-making process that helps beginning teachers to organize their thoughts about classroom events. Reflection is linked to professional forms of inquiry and goal setting, and is promoted as a model of learning that views teaching as an ongoing process of knowledge building. Boreen, et al. (2000) suggest a variety of means by which a mentor can encourage a student teacher to reflect upon their practice, from mapping classroom landscapes to writing a reflective journal to documenting practice using video. As in other chapters, the authors draw upon relevant literature about the value of reflective practice (Dewey, 1910; Schön, 1983) and provide narrative scenarios and examples to illustrate the ideas in practice. As a university advisor, my goal is to liberate both mentor and student teachers to ask questions about practice, to examine and critique what is known in theory, and to construct their own meaning in practice. Mentoring Beginning Teachers provides useful activities for promoting reflective analysis on critical incidences, the social organization of classrooms, discussion and questioning techniques, and classroom movement. Experiencing the diversity of children in the daily life of schools, and making professional decisions about how to respect and respond to the different needs of each child, is a significant challenge for teachers. In the classroom, faced with many decisions and requirements to act each day, a teacher’s values, beliefs, and attitudes are put to the test. Therefore, putting professional dialogue into practice is an important and challenging enterprise. Chapter 7, entitled, “How Do I Encourage Professional Development?”, offers strategies for assisting, supporting and guiding ongoing professional inquiry and development in order to steer beginning teachers towards enduring scholarly success. This chapter focuses on setting goals, identifying pathways and developing a teaching portfolio as part of individual professional development planning. In the section on classroom-based inquiry, Boreen, et al. (2000) focus on the rewarding aspects of university educators, classroom mentors and beginning teachers conducting collaborative research on teaching and learning questions. In my opinion, Mentoring Beginning Teachers is a gem. The authors achieve their goal of appealing to a broad audience that includes K-12 classroom teachers who work with novice and beginning teachers, administrators who are interested in establishing mentoring programs in their districts, university educators who work with mentors and student teachers, and beginning teachers themselves. The book provides important starting points to initiate mentoring conversations, identifies the value in reflective dialogue about practice that is at the heart of good mentoring relationships and professional practice, and provides ways to inquire into what is often held intuitively about becoming a professional teacher. The authors place high value on intentional mentoring relationships that induct new colleagues into the profession. Boreen, et al. (2000) confront head on some of the thornier issues to do with mentoring, such as the tensions that may arise from lack of time for professional dialogue, philosophical differences between mentor and beginning teacher, failure to separate mentoring from evaluation, and inappropriate length of relationship. Inquiry questions in each chapter provide excellent starting points for reflective writing and dialogue. Strategies and activities are provided that can help beginning and mentor teachers, and university educators, to gather observational data in order to reflect on and make sense of events in the classroom. In the final chapter, the authors use a question and answer format to delve into the potential concerns that a mentor may have about inviting a student teacher into their classroom. Questions such as “what if I don’t know enough?” to “what if the students prefer the student teacher to me?” are explored in a thoughtful and affirmative manner. The authors provide well-grounded advice on how to approach constructive criticism and appropriate preparation and planning for instruction. An extensive resource section at the back of the book provides references and websites on action research, beginning teaching, classroom management, lesson planning, mentoring, professional development and reflection. At less than $20 US, the book provides very good value for the money. As a university educator, I found Mentoring Beginning Teachers to be immediately applicable to my own teaching practice and relationships with student teachers and mentor teachers, and full of useful strategies for promoting a reflective stance on professional development and inquiry into practice. References Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S.L. (2001). Beyond certainty: Taking an inquiry stance. In Lieberman, A. & Miller, L. (eds). Teachers Caught in the Action. NY, Teachers College Press. Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. Boston: D. C. Heath. Odell, S. J. (1992). Teacher mentoring and teacher retention. Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 200- 204. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. About the Reviewer Dr. Michele Jacobsen University of Calgary 1102 Education Tower 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, AB Canada T2N 1N4