Mentoring in an Urban Context

Notes on Yendol-Hoppey, D., Jacobs, J., & Dana, N. (2009). Critical concepts of mentoring in an urban context. The New Educator, 5, 25-44.

This is a qualitative study about the work of mentors in high-poverty urban schools.

Research questions included:

1) In what ways do mentors conceptualize and enact their work with novice teachers? 2) What unique challenges do these mentors face in their work?

3) In what ways do these mentors address the unique challenges of learning to teach in an urban context with their mentees?

The authors note four critical concepts: novice teacher survival, novice teacher success, onus of responsibility, and a social justice stance. Survival involves the micropolitical climate within a school and district, which can sometimes seem toxic in high poverty, urban schools.Success, on the other hand, is engaging teachers in the ability to differeniate instruction based on students' needs and cultivating an awareness of social justice within the classroom.

Three assertions emerged from the data analysis.

1) Mentors must negotiate tensions between survival and focusing on student learning, as well as helping mentees accept responsibility for their own growth.

2) Social justice requires education, commitment, and passion.

3) School leadership is key as they nurture the learning culture at a school.

In order to successfully mentor, time is critical in the schools, as is a relationship built on trust. The authors stated that mentors were not involved in the mentees evaluation, but I wonder who evaluates the mentors. In my experience, if the principal at a site is the evaluator for the mentor, then things become complicated. While I worked as a mentor, I repeatedly said I could not be involved in evaluating a mentee, that it was not my role. However, I was frequently asked to do just that. In order for mentoring to be successful and truly built on trust, structures need to be implemented to keep the role from being just another layer of evaluation.

While this study focused on urban schools, I wonder if these concepts would also be true in rural schools with high poverty. I'm also wondering how the four critical concepts connect to the work in partnership schools. Do pre-service teachers in partnership schools experience and learn to manage the novice teacher "survivor" stressors in their interships so they are not as daunting in their first year of teaching? What role does the collaborating teacher play in dealing with the micropolitics in the school?