Seeing and framing mentoring through the lens of knowledge practices

In this paper I draw on empirical work I have been involved in since 2016, involving over 1200 teacher mentors, to discuss a key issue that has arisen – the professional knowledge required to mentor effectively. This work includes the development of a curriculum for training school-based mentors of trainee and newly qualified teachers, Enhance your Mentoring Skills, delivered regionally across South Yorkshire (Pountney and Grasmeder, 2018), as well as nationally for mentors of mid-career teachers on the Chartered Teacher programme of the Chartered College of Teaching. I begin by discussing briefly what is known about teachers’ mentoring practices, and understandings of what constitutes professional knowledge. Next, I discuss the nature of mentor teachers’ learning for practice, and the difficulties inherent in articulating this to themselves, and to others. I illustrate this with examples, to show how the problem can be differentiated in two dimensions of meaning: the first is closeness to context (semantic gravity) and the second is the degree of conceptual complexity (semantic density). Finally, I discuss the need for a specialised language for mentoring and how this can promote the professional status of mentors, as well as building knowledge about, and for, effective mentoring practice.