Sharing mentoring experiences of elementary teachers : moving towards collaborative learning communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative, illustrative study inquired into the mentoring experiences of six teachers in the Lower Mainland of Greater Vancouver. The purpose of this study was to examine factors that enhanced or hindered the mentoring relationships. Data consisted of transcripts from semi-structured interviews. The constant comparative method (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) was used to analyze data. Many teachers preferred hierarchical mentoring, where one person was more experienced than the other. Participants also preferred mentoring that was informal, friendly and reciprocal, and strongly favoured working with someone of similar background and educational platform, with diversity, conflict and negativity avoided. Participants also expressed a preference for mentoring that was non-evaluative, practical, safe and respectful. Teachers described characteristics that hindered mentoring relationships as being assigned to or experiencing a negative mentoring situation, workload and stress. Furthermore, the lack of time and financial support for mentoring and professional development was an issue. The participants' preference for more experienced teachers as mentors, which suggests a hierarchical relationship, contradicted findings that suggested participants also want mentoring relationships that are nonhierarchical and collaborative, based on treating each other as 'equals'. I suggest that collaborative mentoring can occur if more innovative, truly collaborative partnerships between universities and schools are encouraged, which may include teachers engaging in action research. I also suggest that collaborative mentoring coupled with action research may provide practical, timely, ongoing support for the professional development and the life-long inquiry into the practice of student, novice and experienced teachers. Finally, the study suggests the need for addressing and reducing teacher workload and stress, combined with a drastic change in the culture of educational organizations for collaborative mentoring to succeed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".