Mentoring and coaching trainee and early career teachers: further detail and published reports
The National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) has published the findings from the first two stages of its inaugural research project, ‘Mentoring and coaching trainee and early career teachers’.
The project has four stages, overseen by an expert panel of practitioners, academics and providers:
1) Conceptual Review
Identifies the key terms, definitions, concepts and approaches in the field and sets out a theoretical framework for how school-based mentoring can achieve a range of outcomes.
2) Current Practice Survey
Presents the results of a Teacher Tapp survey of teachers, conducted in early July 2022. It includes almost 300 early career mentees and more than 1,000 mentors in order to give an overview of current mentoring practice for teachers with fewer than five years’ experience.
3) Rapid Evidence Review
With priorities informed by the first two stages, this explores the quantitative evidence and associated implementation studies, to test how mentoring can be most effective in improving outcomes, including teacher practice, wellbeing and retention.
4) Thematic Synthesis
This review thematically synthesised three reports commissioned by the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) Mentoring and coaching trainee and early career teachers project. These comprised: a conceptual review of theoretical and empirical literature on mentoring and coaching (19 reviews and 48 theoretical and framework sources Maxwell et al., 2022), a current practice survey of over 1,000 school leaders, 1,000 mentors and almost 300 mentees (Allen et al., 2022), and a rapid evidence review of the impact evidence base on teacher mentoring and coaching (62 impact evaluations; Stevenson et al., 2022). T
5) Key takeaways
After conducting the initial research, the NIoT research team then asked a sample of ECTs, mentors, school leaders and researchers what their burning questions were about mentoring, which were pooled into the seven key questions below. This document maps some of the findings of NIoT’s investigation to those key questions