‘Our monthly meetings have been very inspiring and enriching, since listening to other colleagues and their experiences help us in our professional and, undoubtedly, personal growth. Thank you!’ (Silvia Severino)
Mentors of teacher-research are a relatively small group within the ELT community, but this group is growing as EAR (Exploratory Action Research) becomes widely recognised as an effective form of CPD. Like teaching, we tend to do mentoring on our own, so our monthly meetings provide support and a forum for mentors to share their experiences, doubts, problems and successes.
We are a core group of 20 to 25 mentors who meet regularly, and MenTRnet has 300 members to date. We are truly international, with members in Ecuador, Argentina, UK, Spain, Uzbekistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cameroon and Rwanda among others. We are all working in very different contexts and through these monthly meetings we have formed a community that provides support.
Here is what some of our members say about the meetings:
‘I would like to share that I have evolved as a mentor because these meetings have provided opportunities for breakout room discussions, where mentors get to share their challenges, successes and experiences in small groups or pairs. This helps to get practical tips from each other in resolving our own concerns with mentees/ TRs [Teacher-Researchers]. Additionally, every month we get to explore different aspects of the mentoring process through special lectures, group members sharing their personal stories, short presentations and other interesting ways . This is useful in reiterating mentor qualities/role to help support our mentees or TRs in the most effective and creative ways.’ (Vanita Chopra)
‘The MenTRnet sessions provide mentors with the right atmosphere for emotional bonding to kick in, which is key for dialogic feedback and active listening to work their magic so that we all walk towards the same goal: caring is sharing.’ (Sidney Martin Mota)
Brief account of our sessions
Mariana Serra and Ana García Stone have been organising these monthly meetings since April 2023 and here we describe how we organise them and choose the topics.
When we first started meeting as a group, we followed the stages as set out in Richard Smith’s (2020) handbook for mentoring, and each month we covered the topics in the handbook, with each session led by different members. Once we became an established group, we widened the issues for discussion and we (Mariana and Ana) chose topics that might be of interest and relevant to everyone. These have included the following: workload concerns, managing time, ethical considerations, community-building, reflection on our practice through analysing critical incidents, and maintaining mentor motivation.
The way topics are chosen
The ideas for the sessions arise from different sources: in a monthly meeting ethics were mentioned and we thought it would be interesting to have a whole session on the topic. We read an article published by a colleague Seden Eraldemir Tuyan (2023), where she raised interesting issues on community-building so we invited her to speak to the group. In a webinar, we heard Ernesto Vargas Gil talk about reflexivity and we thought that it would be relevant to mentors when using questioning techniques with their mentees. Members of the group also suggest topics and lead sessions. The sessions are a combination of theoretical considerations as well as eminently practical suggestions.
Dynamics of the sessions
Our meetings tend to follow a similar pattern: after we have shared the meeting plan, we introduce the speaker(s), who give(s) a short presentation before putting us all into break-out rooms with topics/questions to discuss. Back in the main room the spokesperson for each group summarises the discussion they have had in their break-out room to give feedback to the whole group. Sometimes we also share our reflections on Padlet. We record the sessions and these are made available to the MenTRnet membership so anyone who was unable to attend can watch the meeting.
In August 2024 we introduced a change in the dynamics of the session. The topic was ‘Is there such a thing as a difficult mentee?’. Small groups in break-out rooms were given different authentic case studies with a “problem mentee”. Participants were asked to suggest possible solutions and back in the main room, they shared these with the group. Finally, we shared with the participants the solutions given by the actual mentors, and we followed this with further analysis and reflections. We drew interesting conclusions from this process; for example, a mentee may be having problems with understanding data collection methods but this is disguised as procrastination, so the mentor spent time one-to-one with the mentee to solve the issue.
Upcoming meetings (March and April sessions)
We are happy to announce that our next meeting will take place on March 1st. The main speaker will be Ernesto Vargas Gil who will be speaking about Reflexivity, with special attention given to the questions we ask as mentors.
On April 5th, our third meeting of the year will be in Angi Malderez’ hands. Her topic will be Listening and it will be based on her latest book, Mentoring Teachers- Supporting Learning, Wellbeing and Retention (2024). Participants will reflect on their skills as listeners (challenges, incidents) after listening and interacting with the renowned author.
Our MenTRnet support sessions are held monthly and last around 60 to 90 minutes. We remind MenTRnet members of our meetings a week before by email where we announce the topic and the name/s of the speaker(s) and we provide the Zoom link for the encounter.
If you are mentoring teachers or plan to mentor teachers, join our thriving community – you would be very welcome!
Malderez, A. (2024). Mentoring Teachers: Supporting Learning, Wellbeing and Retention. Routledge.
Smith R. (2020). Mentoring teachers to research their classrooms: a practical handbook. British Council.
Tuyan, S. E. (2023). Dialogic research mentoring in pre-service teacher education. Emerald, 12(3), 267-283., https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-12-2021-0110
About the Author(s)
Ana García Stone
Ana García Stone is based in Madrid and has worked in ELT for 30 years as a teacher, teacher trainer and teacher educator. Her current interests are mentoring teacher classroom-research and teacher-led forms of CPD. She has recently mentored teachers in Thailand and Cameroon.
Mariana Serra
Mariana Serra is a teacher and a licentiate in English working at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She has co-moderated international workshops on Teacher-Research since 2020 and the Mentoring Teacher-Research sessions twice. She helped to develop the Enhancement mentoring for teacher-research: A positive approach in a crisis (2021), co-wrote Mentoring Presence for Supporting International Teacher-Researchers (2022) and co-edited Stories of Mentoring Teacher-Research (2024). She is now part of Project Erasmus (UBA- Çağ Üniversitesi).
This is an excellent and very informative blog on what’s going on in our sessions. I like the fact that, apart from describing the beginnings and our regular practice, the blog post also tells us about upcoming Guest Speaker events. I especially look forward to Angi Malderez’s presentation and the contribution of those members of the community who have written book reviews on Angi’s book as they may have special insights on how mentors listen so that their mentees can be truly heard!