Abstract:
Mentoring by senior colleagues is frequently promoted as “best practice” for the induction and retention of early career teachers (ECTs) (AITSL, 2023). Indeed, decades of research attest to the crucial role of mentors in socialising new teachers into the profession (Ronfeldt, 2021; Zeichner & Gore, 1990). But mentoring can have a “dark side” (Long, 1997), inadvertently disempowering new teachers at a crucial time in their professional formation (Gore, 2020; Long, 2010). For instance, mentoring approaches to teacher professional learning and development (PL/D) tend to treat teaching technically and atomistically, rely too heavily on mentors’ knowledge and expertise, and conceptualise ECT PL/D as occurring separately to that of mentors (Gore, 2020). We explore the efficacy of an alternative approach to ECT induction, Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) (Bowe & Gore, 2017), that, instead, positions new teachers and their knowledge as a resource in collective efforts to improve teaching practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ECTs, experienced teachers (EXTs), and school leaders as part of a federally funded project to strengthen school-based induction practices in Australia, we identified the value of approaches that flatten traditional expert-novice hierarchies—for both ECTs and EXTs alike. Specifically, ECTs benefited from not only receiving structured feedback from EXTs on their teaching, but also from observing them teach and giving them feedback, and from deliberating with EXTs—and even school leaders—about the quality of teaching, as part of QTR. At the same time, EXTs benefited from the formal opportunity to develop their mentoring practice, the fresh ideas and insights into current theory and research new teachers provided, and, importantly, from being challenged by ECTs’ feedback during professional discussions. We argue that while mentoring has a role to play in supporting ECT induction, “business as usual” mentoring practices could be greatly enhanced with the use of QTR. QTR offers a more empowering and efficient form of “reciprocal mentoring” (Boyer et al., 2004) that quickly boosts teachers’ professionalism, confidence, and commitment to teaching. Finally, we believe QTR can “even the playing field” further still, making the distribution of mentors to ECTs more equitable—not only by providing all ECTs with access to experienced colleagues who can assist them to put theory into practice, but also, by providing all EXTs with the opportunity to share their knowledge, gain new knowledge, and to become role models for the next generation of teachers.