For any school, the benefits of a successful mentoring programme in school for your NQTs or RQTs should not be underestimated.
For the school
- A key, often underestimated, benefit of investing in mentoring is the way mentors can use the experience to accelerate school improvement:
- Through supporting NQTs’ early development, mentors see their school through a fresh pair of eyes, enabling objective review and analysis of their own and their colleagues’ practise
- By introducing new teachers to school policies and approaches, and helping them map these onto new knowledge from initial training, mentors expand their knowledge of what’s possible and bring up to date evidence about best practice to the school
- Through making explicit links between mentoring conversations and the school’s model of pedagogy
For the mentor
- The mentors themselves will new skills and knowledge, along with specialist coaching they will be able to use throughout their career:
- Enabling them to make additional contributions to school improvement through using their new skills, and their expanding knowledge of the challenges that NQTs and Early Career Teachers experience, to test and refine the school model of pedagogy
- Gaining meta-cognitive control over their own professional practice through reviewing it in the light of new approaches from NQTs and the opportunity to observe intense development in depth
- Developing an evidenced portfolio of leadership and professional development facilitation skills, empowering their career progression
- And the satisfaction of helping and inspiring another teacher, someone in their own chosen profession, to develop the skills and habits of lifelong professional learning to promote direct benefits for pupils, NQT’s leadership progress and their retention
For the mentee
- The mentees will benefit directly from a trained support network using proven, evidence-led practices:
- Access to a trained mentor who will use an enquiry based, expert professional learning process to help them take responsibility for their own learning and confident control of their career progression
- Support from their mentor with the big building blocks of new and early career teacher development including:
- managing workload, wellbeing, and developing personal resilience and confidence
- engaging with research to adapt learning from ITT to the specific needs of their school and their learners from disadvantaged backgrounds through, for example, formative assessment
- deepening subject and curriculum knowledge to enhance, for example, formative assessment, offering challenging learning experiences for all learners and enhancing learning through the arts
- Support them in developing the confidence to take responsibility for their own, ongoing professional learning and a growing understanding of how their own work based professional learning is contributing to their own schools and learner’s development
- Feel safe in the knowledge that they are being supported by people who have not only made it through the early stages of their own career but are also professionally trained to address the specific concerns and problems that being an NQT raises
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