COSERE | 163 3.1. Mentoring in education Mentoring provides an opportunity to improve students’ learning outcomes through teachers learning with and from each other. Mentoring enables teachers to reflect on their practice and to question what they do as they go about their teaching. As a means of collegial professional learning, mentoring requires careful planning and effective implementation so that it becomes embedded into the culture of the school (A Learning, 2010). Little (1990) ranks mentoring among the strong forms of peer support, i.e. those that have a clear impact in practice. Mentoring is considered one of the oldest models of collaboration to support human development. Definition of mentoring Zachary (2005, p. 3) defines mentoring as a reciprocal relationship of collaboration and learning between two or more people who share a mutual responsibility to achieve the aims of the mentee. Learning becomes a basic process, an aim, and a product of mentoring. Similarly, Kochan and Pascarelli (2003) considered successful mentoring a process within which two or more people are voluntarily educated (shaped) in a mutually respectful and close relationship focused on achieving certain objectives. Mentoring guidance is based on a voluntary relationship of trust. If the school has mandatory mentoring for novice teachers, then it makes sense to differentiate between teacher introduction and mentoring. However, these terms are often used synonymously, and it is assumed that even if mentoring is formally mandated, the mentee is encouraged to express his or her learning needs. Who is a mentee? Target groups of mentoring, however, are not uniformly delineated. Very often, mentoring is perceived synonymously with the process of induction of new teachers or sharing experience with the younger ones (Portner, 2005). Thus, some publications on mentoring relate only to the guidance of novice or student teachers, but we see mentoring as a form of peer support across age groups of teachers. Who is a mentor? The mentor is usually an experienced teacher providing support and assistance to teachers to enhance their professional growth and success at work (Jonson, 2008). A teacher-mentor does not have to be more experienced only in terms of “age and length of practice“ but is more experienced in a certain area (e.g. writing projects, working with ICT etc.), which means that in the peer concept of mentoring, a younger teacher can also be a mentor to an older teacher. Therefore, some authors make a clearer distinction between mentoring and induction of novice teachers (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011).
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