A manifesto for dialogic mentoring

Mentoring matters

Mentoring has been the thread weaving its way through my professional life for over 30 years.  I have been committed to it as a teacher, mentor, teacher educator, leader, mentor developer and researcher. I believe in its power and potential. But I fear for its future in English schools.

This is my manifesto for dialogic mentoring.

Mentoring is a dynamic and multi-faceted practice. I acknowledge the importance of mentors facilitating the development of their mentee through modelling practice, explaining expectations, co-working, complementing centralised training with bespoke and contextualised resources and opportunities, making judgements and giving feedback against standards.    

At the heart of good mentoring is a sustained and sustaining conversation between two people.  This mentoring conversation starts at first introductions, and its impact can last a lifetime.

Two sides of the mentoring coin

Good mentoring is a goal worth striving for.  

• It is built on reciprocal appreciation between mentor and mentee.
• It offers a safe space in which to understand and rehearse new professional responsibilities.
• It enables sense-making and problem-solving to develop appropriate professional practice.
• It acts as a method by which schools contribute to securing the viability of the profession.
• It creates opportunities for mentors to develop a professional repertoire which can enhance their own future careers.

Good mentoring cannot be taken for granted.  

• Not all mentors want to be in the mentoring role.
• Mentoring usually adds to, rather than replaces, the existing burden of teaching and/or leadership workload.
• Mentoring can reinforce hierarchical and power-laden school culture.
• Mentoring can be distorted by quality assurance and accountability imperatives.
• Mentors can experience anxieties about being credible role models, expert advisors and infallible repositories of exhaustive professional knowledge.

Mentoring in the danger zone

We are facing a mentoring crunch and experiencing mentoring churn. In England new ITT and ECF mentoring requirements demand a ramping up of mentoring hours, an expansion of obligatory mentor training and a tightening of the mentoring programme to meet the DfE designated curriculum frameworks.  

The more we externalise the mentoring agenda the less situated and personalised mentoring becomes. The more time we demand from each mentor the less likely it is that mentors can commit to mentoring as an ongoing aspect of their professional lives. As teacher recruitment and retention difficulties impact directly on the current teaching workforce the capacity for mentoring will be further eroded. 

Dialogic mentoring; a manifesto

My motives as an educator are to ensure the sustainability of the teaching profession.  

• I want the profession to be brim-full of brilliant and energised people. 
• I want an education system which allows teachers and leaders who can do their best work without burning out. 
• I want everyone who works in schools to be able to advocate for all children and young people without compromise. 
• I want educators whose own ongoing education is the lifeblood of their professionalism and self-efficacy. 
• I want new teachers to feel welcomed for the talents that they bring and the diversity they add. 
• I want mentors whose work breathes life into the profession and whose work is rightly held in the highest esteem.  

My manifesto challenges the status quo. It demands a de-escalation of some of the routines now assumed necessary for mentors’ work with trainee and early career teachers. 

We need to put conversation back at the heart of mentoring. 

• We need to create a more bespoke mentoring workforce who have the attributes that enhance these conversations. 
• We need to prioritise mentoring as a formative, generative and compassionate practice.

I believe that mentoring needs to be reconceptualised as a dialogic act. 

• It needs to be an uncluttered space in which mentors and mentees can truly discuss, debate, deliberate and develop together. 
• It needs to create meaningful connections with the mentees’ and mentors’ wider professional learning, providing opportunities for fact-checking, clarification, challenge and change.  
• It needs to put people and ethics before process and false fidelity. 
• It needs to honour the dignity of mentors and mentees at all career stages. 
• It needs to enable professional development and personal growth through engagement, enquiry and empathy. 

Building a network for critical engagement through CollectivED

A manifesto is more than a wish-list.  It has to also be a call to action. It has to indicate what people can do. Current mentoring in ITT and ECF is being squeezed into the new directed frameworks while also expanded to meet increased capacity demand.  This may feel like an immovable object with a high degree of resistance. It also creates an imperative to keep challenging the dominant discourses.  

In the enactment of our current education policy accountability and fidelity are the privileged dominant discourses. They have become seen as essential components of scaling up. But there are other ways of conceptualising this.  Scaling up of practices based on human interaction, such as mentoring, rely on enhancing the quality and expanding the impact each individual mentoring relationship. These relationships are built across moments in time, through authentic engagement and through the mentoring conversations. Such conversations have the potential to plants the seeds for contemporary and future professional and personal growth through modelling a critical, curious and creative stance. 

There are serving and former teachers, teacher educators and school-leaders whose wisdom is untapped, and whose breath of experience in schools forms a reservoir of expertise that is too readily over-ridden by monologic training frameworks for which mentoring has become a delivery mechanism. 
I am fortunate that I can provide a space for such conversations between mentors, and others with a keen interest in professional learning through leading and hosting CollectivED, The Centre for Coaching, Mentoring, Supervision and Professional Learning. CollectivED is all about the power of people, to share, to support, to build trust, to reflect, to learn and to enable and empower. We form a community of professionals, academics and students with shared interests. 
This is one way that I intend to build on this manifesto for dialogic mentoring.  But there are many others – what action does this manifesto call you to take?

This blogpost is also published in Mentoring Magazine, Issue 1