Mentorship for flourishing in schools: an explicit shift toward appreciative action
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Building on findings from research designed to bring to description teachers’ own understandings of what it means to flourish in their work, the purpose of this paper is to show how principals and teacher–leaders in schools are agents capable of building developmental relationships and mentoring cultures that can orient and support teachers toward well-being. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper is anchored with findings from a multi-year qualitative research project that was designed using perspectives from positive organizational studies and positive psychology scholarship. The research methods encompassed collaborative and generative use of appreciative inquiry and strength-based research activities in school districts in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan, Canada. Data used to build this conceptual paper are from appreciative focus group conversations with teachers and principals over the course of two years. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were thematically analyzed using the research literature framing the study. Findings This paper offers four domains of inquiry and a model for flourishing schools that encourages principals and teacher–leaders to develop habits of mind and heart to build developmental relationships in ways that help both mentors and mentees to embody and enact positive, appreciative and generative ways of noticing, nurturing and sustaining the work of teaching and learning; all with aspiration to sustain and enhance the well-being of every member of the school community. Practical implications This paper offers conceptual models and storied descriptions that can aid mentors in noticing and nurturing more developmental relationship approaches to mentoring for well-being as opportunities to build mentoring relationships from appreciative and growth-based habits and approaches. As these relationships are built across the school, positive mentoring cultures may foster and grow in ways that promotes a flourishing-for-all approach to teaching and learning. Originality/value This paper contributes a different and complimentary perspective to research and practice on mentoring, offering a positive organizational perspective that highlights and promotes the perceived and evidenced benefits of deliberately focusing on what goes well and what provokes vitality in schools. The conceptual models in this paper offer tools for mentors and mentees to develop and foster in others appreciative and positive capacities for positive mentoring.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 it