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Kortman, S. A., & Honaker, C. J. (2002). The BEST
Mentoring Experience: A Framework for Professional
Development. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing
Company.
Product Bundle includes 115 pages (Book), 195 pages
(Facilitators Guide), Slides (CD-ROM).
$500 ISBN: 0-7872-8171-9
Reviewed by Michele Jacobsen
University of Calgary
June 14, 2004
Beginning teachers bring energy, hope and optimism to their
first classrooms. New teachers also encounter a confounding array
of demands and challenges that impact their developing teaching
practice and their beliefs about becoming an effective teacher.
An overwhelming set of new roles and responsibilities for new
teachers along with a demanding workload can deplete energy and
turn hope and optimism into burnout or withdrawal. The BEST
program has been intentionally designed to counteract some of the
challenges that lead many new teachers to leave the
profession.
In The BEST Mentoring Experience: A Framework for
Professional Development, Kortman and Honaker outline the
BEST approach to supporting and mentoring new teachers so they
can better navigate the commonly choppy seas during the first and
second years of teaching. The BEST Mentoring Experience: A
Framework for Professional Development is specifically
focused on the professional development and support of
experienced teachers who mentor beginning teachers.
What is BEST? The Beginning Educator Support Team (BEST)
program in the College of Education at Arizona State University
is a partnership between university and school districts that
provides comprehensive support and training in the areas of
teaching induction, mentoring and preparation for aligning
teaching practice to state teaching standards. BEST is a
three-year teacher induction and mentoring partnership program
that is focused on providing support and encouragement to
beginning teachers and mentors. Developed at
Arizona State University, BEST includes four program components: (1) BEST for
Beginning Educators, (2) BEST Classroom Visitation Support, (3)
PEP Professionals Evolving Practice, and (4) BEST for Mentor
Teachers. Professional development and support is provided for
mentor teachers through six seminars during the school year,
one-on-one beginning teacher and mentor interactions and choice
activities that relate to the context of their mentoring
practices. Several resources based on the BEST program have been
published; reviewed here is the product bundle that is targeted
for mentor teachers.
The BEST Mentoring Experience: A Framework for Professional
Development product bundle consists of a Mentor’s Text,
a Facilitators Guide and a CDROM with prepared slides. The
BEST Mentoring Experience text is for mentor teachers. The
six chapters of the text correspond to six mentor teacher
seminars outlined in the Facilitators Guide. In order, the
content in the six chapters ranges from (1) establishing a
mentoring relationship, (2) encouraging teachers through
mentoring, (3) developing teaching skills and support through
mentoring, (4) analyzing and planning for professional growth
through mentoring, (5) strengthening teacher practices through
mentoring, to (6) reflecting on the mentoring relationship. Each
chapter in the mentor text includes a planning calendar and
actions to be scheduled, tips for success, content related
information and reflection activities, topics to discuss with
mentee, professional development lesson plans, mentor/mentee
interaction logs, journal entry, resources and extended choice
activities. A range of activities are provided that will support
the education of mentor teachers. Each chapter is designed to
lead the mentor teacher through content related to mentor
development via working documents, an application to classroom
focus and regular reflection activities for ongoing professional
growth.
The BEST Mentoring Experience Program Facilitator Guide
provides direction with prepared curriculum and detailed seminar
plans for the six seminars in a mentoring program. For each of
the six seminars, instructors are provided with learning
objectives, a timetable, scripts and ideas for the seminar,
instructor resources, participant resources and prepared slides
for visual display. The step-by-step seminar scripts appear to be
well-designed and straight forward. Instructors are even told
what to do at the end of a seminar, “Make yourself
personally available to participants as they are leaving”.
The participant resources are duplicates of those found in the
mentor text. Instructors are encouraged to read through an entire
module in preparation for leading a seminar and to customize
modules and tailor content by using specific school and district
examples and resources. Program evaluation methods and data
collection tools are provided in each module to assist
instructors in assessing program effectiveness. For example,
conference planning tools, feedback for refinement and
reinforcement of teaching practices, journaling for
communication, observation feedback and participant feedback.
The CD-ROM that is included with the facilitators guide contains
the slides for the six seminars.
The authors suggest that The BEST Mentoring Experience
text might serve as a stand alone resource for mentor teachers
who are not involved in a state or district mentoring program.
Given the quality of the articles, resources and activities, I
agree that The BEST Mentoring Experience text may be
useful for individual teachers who aim to improve their mentoring
practice. The BEST Mentoring Experience Facilitators Guide
offers another level of value to the individual learner. However,
neither of these resources stands on its own. I found that The
BEST Mentoring Experience text must be read along with The
BEST Mentoring Experience Facilitators Guide in order to
maximize the effectiveness of the six seminar modules.
For several reasons, I do not agree with the authors about
using these materials as self-teaching resources. First, I
anticipate that the greatest value to be gained from these two
resources depends on the professional dialogue, social
interaction and sharing that would occur in regularly scheduled,
facilitated seminars or meetings of even two teaching colleagues
who share a commitment to mentoring beginning teachers. The
individual narratives and lived mentoring experiences that
teacher-mentors might discuss and debate in regularly scheduled
mentoring seminars or pair meetings would likely have the
greatest impact on individual professional development. Second,
in ways similar to beginning teachers who benefit from having an
intentional and systematic support system in place as they
transition to new roles, experienced teachers who are navigating
new mentoring relationships will likely benefit most from being
part of a learning community with a shared vision and goal. In
their book, Teachers Caught in the Action: Professional
Development that Matters, Ann Lieberman and Lynne Miller
(2001) emphasize the need to create and sustain learning
communities that offer time and space for conversation, joint
action, and critique. Third, I believe that the text and
facilitators guide need to be used together to serve as an
effective catalyst for professional discourse and group
interaction in learning communities rather than as self-teaching
resources. The purchase price for the product bundle is not
within reach of most individual teachers. Finally, I realize that
distance and scheduling may be challenges for teachers who would
like to participate in a series of BEST Mentoring
Experience seminars. For participants who are distributed
geographically, an online learning community supported by
communications technology would enable pairs or groups of
teachers to gather together (with or without a seminar
facilitator) and regularly discuss their mentoring beliefs,
practices and experiences. The BEST Mentoring Experience
resources offer a group a set of ready made materials that can
serve as a framework for learning together in community.
Mentor teachers will likely find the embedded mentor
self-analysis and goal setting activities related to mentoring
practice to be valuable for their own professional development
and growth. The introductory paragraphs and three articles
included on Stages of a Teachers First Year, Reflective
Questioning and How the Mentoring Relationship Facilitates
Protégé Growth, are helpful for making explicit the
roles and responsibilities of mentees and mentors. The strategies
and techniques provided for each seminar help mentors to be
intentional and deliberate about their relationship with their
mentee. In the introduction to the fourth seminar, for example,
mentors are asked to consider the cyclical nature of mentoring
and the stage that mentees may be at with regard to their
expectations for the mentors’ role. Mentoring may initially
be viewed as helping with the emotional adjustment to teaching
and as taking care of logistics versus a relationship directly
connected to teaching practice. Mentors are encouraged to be
purposeful in identifying areas for reinforcement and refinement
with their mentee to continue to encourage and promote
professional growth beyond areas of immediacy and survival.
The authors present a range of useful and well designed
mentoring activities, strategies and approaches to be used with
experienced teachers in six mentoring seminars scheduled during
the school year. While these resources have been written to
support mentor and beginning teachers, many of the prepared
resources and strategies in The BEST Mentoring Experience: A
Framework for Professional Development may also be useful for
university faculty who supervise students teachers during their
extended field experiences. For example, the approaches to
reflective questioning described in seminar two will be helpful
for cultivating reflective dialogue with student teachers and the
classroom data collection techniques presented in seminar three
will be useful for documenting classroom events for reflective
analysis. However, I believe that in order to maximize the
credibility and usefulness of these resources, the authors need
to cite and document the research that they claim provides a
solid foundation for the design of the BEST Mentoring Experience
Framework. While the claims that the authors explicitly make
regarding the effectiveness of strategies and the viability of
certain methods “based on research” have high content
validity, it is important to reference and support these claims
using specific research and literature citations. As it stands,
the claim that the BEST Mentoring Experience curriculum is
research based rings hollow given the paucity of citations and
references to the vast research literature on teacher induction,
mentoring and professional development.
An aspect of The BEST Mentoring Experience: A Framework for
Professional Development Facilitators Guide that I recommend
for improvement is related to visual message design. In each
module, there is a Seminar Planning and Set-Up checklist for the
seminar that includes a clock diagram that is divided into
quarters. The diagram summarizes a structured approach to
organizing each 3 hour seminar by allocating 30 minutes for
Opening and Relationship Building, 2 hours (120 minutes) for
Content delivery and 30 minutes for Questions, Concerns and
Closing. However, the use of a standard clock diagram to
communicate seminar organization and timetabling in this manner
has two drawbacks. First, the 30-120-30 minute formula does not
transfer well to the six different timetables presented for the
different seminars. So, using a common graphic in this manner
does not communicate useful information. Second, readers may find
the disconnect between the recognized use of quarter and half
hours on a clock to represent 15 and 30 minutes versus the
labeled use of these segments as 30 minutes and 120 minutes (2
hours) to be rather confusing.
Overall, the The BEST Mentoring Experience: A Framework for
Professional Development is a well organized set of materials
and lessons designed to support experienced teachers in mentoring
beginning teachers into the profession and to support
facilitators in leading mentor teachers through a series of six
seminars. The authors’ claim that this is ready to
implement curriculum holds up. For a school district that is
searching for a ready-made solution to creating a resident new
teaching mentoring program, these resources offer a good starting
point. Given the steep purchase price for the product bundle,
the market for The BEST Mentoring Experience: A Framework for
Professional Development is most likely to be found at the
school district or school level and the department or faculty
level on campus rather than being purchased by individual
teachers.
About the Reviewer
Dr. Michele Jacobsen
1102 Education Tower
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB Canada
T2N 1N4
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