| Many teacher education programs hire new mentors every year to work with their student teacher population. The literature about teacher mentoring suggests the importance of relevant and ongoing professional development (PD) for teacher mentors at all levels. However, it is much more commonly the case that most teacher mentors volunteer and do not have access to PD. Past research about mentoring provides a descriptive sense of the practices of experienced mentors, especially within a PD context, but little is known about how novice mentors, who are mentoring for the first or the second time, with no prior PD related to mentoring articulate their work as mentors. Using the telling form of narrative inquiry, my study documented how four novice science mentors (NSMs) who had no prior mentoring-related PD articulated the work of mentoring through the stories they told about their past experiences as learners and teachers. The term learner included experiences that the NSMs had before school through K-12 and in their teacher education programs. The experiences as a teacher referred to NSMs' in-service experiences -- teaching, coaching, and mentoring (if any).;Each NSM was interviewed once a month for a period of five months. The interviews captured experiences of the NSMs since their childhood to present day experiences as teachers to summarize the experiences that informed their current mentoring practices; to document salient mentoring practices they employed; to identify sources and factors that shaped those practices, and to understand mentoring from mentor teachers' perspectives. Clandinin and Connelly's (2000) three commonplaces (temporality- sociality- place ) framework was used for structuring interview questions and analyzing data. The NSMs employed number of practices discussed in the literature. The study found that the most influential life experiences were upbringing, student teaching, teaching, prior mentoring, and coaching. By taking temporality into account, the study revealed that each NSM had a core practice, which was based on their preferred teaching and learning styles, such as hands-on, lecture, etc. Given the core of their practice, the NSMs approached mentoring situations differently, thus making mentoring individualistic in nature. Sociality revealed that beliefs, relationships, and context as the major factors to inform the NSMs' mentoring practices. Place as a factor was significant only in one NSM's stories. These findings suggested a relationship between the NSMs' mentoring practices and professional identity. The study was concluded with an emphasis on the importance of taking in to account the biographies of teacher mentors and their professional identity to understand mentoring practices and the process of mentoring. Based on the findings, it was recommended to offer teacher mentor - centered professional development opportunities to help novice mentors build on their strengths and ways to use their skills to mentor interns in productive ways. |
