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Guest blogger David Cutler shares his warm memories of those who helped him early in his teaching career as an illustration of why mentoring is of critical importance to new teachers.

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Question of the week: Do mentors need mentoring?

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Question of the week: Do mentors need mentoring?

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Mentors need mentoring as well of course: what best practice would a mentor be able to suggest as to Long Life Learning if he didn't engage personally in learning activities and observations? Let's remember that modelling is a top practice and strategy to implement. How to do that? Well, courses like this wonderful, collaborative, interesting and stimulating Mooc are a powerful way to develop both knowledge and practice. Self evaluation/assessment is a great tool to reflect about lots of issues; the community of practice is essential to professional growth. Shadowing other mentors is brilliant! So much to learn. Thanks to everybody here!

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As Maria Jesus put it, there are quite a few advantages in e-mentoring, namely, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, variety and accessibility (the possibility of contact when distance is an obstacle). As for its downside, massification and digital illiteracy may hinder interaction  and relationships are difficult to develop owing to the lack of emotional connection. Anyway, this Mooc is the evidence of the advantages mentioned above, but I still believe that the exchange of views in face-to-face contact is preferable.

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TRICIDER: in the Padlet below share your thoughts on online mentoring. Where in your own practice do you see opportunities to use it? Are there new mentoring relationships that you could engage in through the use of online mentoring? What challenges, downsides, concerns do you see and have about online mentoring? If you have experience of online mentoring share what works and doesn’t work in an online mentoring relationship? What should we watch out for?

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TRICIDER: in the Padlet below share your thoughts on online mentoring. Where in your own practice do you see opportunities to use it? Are there new mentoring relationships that you could engage in through the use of online mentoring? What challenges, downsides, concerns do you see and have about online mentoring? If you have experience of online mentoring share what works and doesn’t work in an online mentoring relationship? What should we watch out for?

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First of all I would like to point out that I find online mentoring a fundamental part of mentoring, which,  in a world that is increasingly moving to more sophisticated forms of video communication, needs to be always updated and engaging.
The only experience I have is not strictly related to mentoring new teachers, but concerns an online master degree(it lasted 2 years and a half) at Politecnico di Milano. That was the greatest experience I have ever  had both for my tutor teacher (a sort of mentor) and for the collegues from all over Italy that I met online. We spent hours studying together, confronting, helping eachother, planning, creating collaborative projects, sharing both personal and professional problems and finding a solution together. Still grateful to my mentor and to my collegues. All this thanks to technology, to online conferences, to Google sharing facilities, to Skype etc...
So...What's more?
Online mentoring works definitely.

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VIDEO: What are the advantages and challenges of online mentoring?

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VIDEO: What are the advantages and challenges of online mentoring?

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Main drawback: it loses the human touch.
Mentors must address those downsides trying to make for them with live events, handouts, webinars, online conversations with the mentee in order to compensate the lack of human touch.
Despite this online mentoring should not differ from face-to-face mentoring . The stages are the same and the results should also be thesame. the only difference is the means of mentoring.

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Mentoring online can offer us some great new opportunities as it decouples to a certain extent the constraints of time and location with our mentoring practice. This provides a variety of opportunities, some of which Maria Jesus and Rachel outline in the videos below. However, as with anything, there are also downsides and things to watch out for if mentoring online is to be successful which Maria Jesus and Rachel address. Take a look, and then consider if and how mentoring online would make sense in your own context.

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TRICIDER: Share your stories of using video in mentoring or during your own training in the Padlet below. What is important to consider when using video, what works and what doesn’t? How do you/mentees feel when watching your/their lesson?

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TRICIDER: Share your stories of using video in mentoring or during your own training in the Padlet below. What is important to consider when using video, what works and what doesn’t? How do you/mentees feel when watching your/their lesson?

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I am no mentor but I am using videos during my lessons, or better, I flip some issues using videos and posting them for my students. It works and if it works for students it shoould also work for teacher students.
What is important is to share this practice with the mentee in advance. If videorecording is considered a relevant tool to be used, the mentor's job is to explain the mentee all the reasons why this is a good practice. Then he must ask him/her if he agrees with it, hoping that he/she will.

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What are the advantages of using videos in a mentoring relationship & how to use video effectively

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What are the advantages of using videos in a mentoring relationship & how to use video effectively

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What are the advantages of using video is a mentoring relationship & how to use video effectively?

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Rachel Lofthouse outlines that video will never capture everything going on in a lesson and it's important to be aware of the limits of what we can capture with a recording. Listen to Rachel's perspective on the use of video and how to use it effectively in the video below.

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VIDEO part 2: What is the impact of bringing a camera into the classroom and how can you deal with this?

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VIDEO part 2: What is the impact of bringing a camera into the classroom and how can you deal with this?

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Every change in the classroom setting changes the way people react.Having anybody sitting in a non usual setting might change the way people are behaving. Maybe some people are more shy during a videorecording.
What helps is using videos quite routinely.
Another way to do this is giving the kids the camera and tell them: we want to see your view of the lesson, so you can use the camera for five minutes. Making them(cameras) part of the process.

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4.1 VIDEO part 1:  What are the advantages of using videos in a mentoring relationship & how to use video effectively

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4.1 VIDEO part 1:  What are the advantages of using videos in a mentoring relationship & how to use video effectively

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'More and more technology is now available and the ability to video record lessons is fairly commonplace.
Videos rebalance some of the power between the mentor and the mentee. The opportunity for the student teachers/new teachers to see themselves in practice, to generate some hypothesys about their own work, to come into a conversation with some clips they want to share with the mentor...all this isn't available if the video isn't taken or shared.

One of the most important tip of using videos as a mentor is like any other lesson observation situation: HAVE A PROPER CONVERSATION WITH THE STUDENT TEACHER/NEW TEACHER, ask them what they would find helpful to have recorded and then decide when to use a video, whether throughout the whole lesson, part of the lesson. It's important to use the video in a way that is productive because it must be linked to the purpose of the lesson observation.

The good things about using videos:
- you can replay some parts of the lesson, keep looking at the details: you can for example discover what it is that created a cycle where the student teacher felt more confident;
-go back and identify what happened before that incidence that you were plased about so that the mentee will be able to recreate that situation in future lessons.
- You can also use the videos to help the student teachers to recognise what aspects of their personality they want to preserve and highten.(a student teacher realised that in a five minutes lesson he said ok' 50 times and the children were counting them too. That caused distraction of course).

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Using video recordings as a tool for shared review of lessons is a powerful mechanism to enhance our mentoring practice.

As Rachel writes in a blog post, the use of video supports

“a feedback loop in practice development and the opportunity for teachers to become more metacognitive in practice […] Video-recording provides teachers with access to their own practice in a way previously not possible, and this has the power to re-frame a teacher’s view of students, of learning and of themselves. If used to its potential it will provide insights, stimulate debate and support reviews of current practice.”

A great thing about recent technical development is that it has made the process of video recording lessons a lot easier. Mobile devices allow us to easily record ourselves and video sharing platforms make the process of sharing video recordings in preparation of a mentoring session very simple.

Nevertheless, it is important to think about when, how and to what purpose video is used. And also what limitations there are to recording a lesson. As Rachel outlines in the video below, video will never capture everything going on in a lesson and it’s important to be aware of the limits of what we can capture with a recording. Take a look at Rachel’s perspective on the use of video and how to use it effectively in the video below.

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INTRODUCTION                                         "One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words”James McQuivey, Vice President at Forrester Research and Author of Digital Disruption

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INTRODUCTION                                         "One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words”James McQuivey, Vice President at Forrester Research and Author of Digital Disruption

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While the above quote might exaggerate the benefit of video over words, it nevertheless highlights the importance of video as a powerful tool for communication, especially in a world that is increasingly moving to more sophisticated forms of video communication (think 360 degree videos and virtual reality). This, to an extent, also applies to our work as mentors (imagine a 360 degree camera as a lesson observation tool).

The use of video for mentoring and the process of mentoring online: Both can shape the mentoring practice quite substantially, offering new opportunities to engage with your mentee and frame the discussion. However, for both it is also important to think about using them effectively and not just for the purposes of trying something new.