ESL teacher Mentorship handbook
This handbook is intended for mentors and mentees alike. Here, you will find accounts of my own personal experiences, tools that I have used in mentorship, references to research articles on mentorship and teacher supervision, and ideas upon which you might reflect throughout the mentorship process. While the experiences and tools that are provided in this handbook are presented from my own personal perspective, I encourage you to reflect on them and to adapt them, rather than seeing them as "copy-and-paste-able" resources.
Having considered separating the website into separate sections for mentors and for mentees, I imagined I would be including much of the same information in both sections. The more that I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that a mentor-mentee relationship should be as transparent as possible. There should be nothing wrong with both the mentor and the
mentee sharing resources, deciding upon the course of action of the program, and engaging in reflection upon the experience. In fact, in a mentor-mentee relationship (rather than a supervisor-teacher relationship), working collaboratively and democratically should be encouraged. From my own personal point of view, I don't know why both the mentor and the mentee should not be aware of the process on which they are embarking.
The second consideration that I made in the making of this handbook was whether it should be for teachers in general or specifically for language teachers. Given that I have always worked in second-language education, I have decided to opt for the latter; the majority of the resources available on this site are geared toward communicative language teaching, and in particular ESL. While the "approaches," "process" and "feedback" sections could be useful for teachers of all kinds, the observation grid is more or less designed for observation in communicative language teaching (CLT) classrooms, and the discussions on identity might be more relevant to ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) individuals and communities.
WHY TEACHER MENTORSHIP?
Approximately 40-50% of novice teachers in North America are reported to leave the profession within their first five years of teaching (Faez & Valeo, 2012). When those teachers have mentors, the ratio drops to 1 in 7 (Gray & Taie, 2015).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my mentee, David Nguyen, for engaging with me in the teacher mentorship experience. I would like to thank my colleague Helene Bramwell for the collaboration on the website format, the online quizzes, and the observation grid, as well as for the continual contact and support. I would like to thank my colleagues Saeid Bayat and Gabriela Bloise for their insight, social engagement and community building. I would like to thank Libing Liu for the idea that a handbook for a mentor and for a mentee cannot be separated; and Katsiaryna Belskaya for the reflection on isolated moments, stories and what constitutes the capturing of a process. I would also like to thank our professor, Teresa Hernandez-Gonzalez, for providing us with an amazing course (from which the vast majority of the reading list on this website was compiled) - We were given a great opportunity to work with a great group of people, to gain experience in our field, to reflect and learn about who we are in our lives and in our professions, and to consider how we can change and move forward in ourselves and in our society.