Mentoring and the science of learning

 When I am not working on mentoring and professional development in my two jobs, I am thinking about...mentoring. I often wonder if you cut me in half, whether I would have mentoring written inside me like a stick of Blackpool rock. There has been a lot of criticism of the direction that mentoring seems to be going in at the moment, articulated really well by a recent Schools Week article on the Early Career Framework becoming a bit of a straitjacket, by Sam Strickland and a recent blog post by Professor Rachel Lofthouse on mentoring being a Cinderella profession. I share some of these concerns about the sometimes prescriptive mentoring practices and one size fits all idea of teacher improvement. In their book, The CPD Curriculum by Zoe and Mark Enser, they stress the importance of making PD bespoke and tailored to teacher need. The same is important of mentoring. As mentors, we need to be adaptive and responsive of our mentees' needs - and these will be fluctuating throughout the time we mentor them. Otherwise, we are technicians, not mentors and we are just mentoring by numbers.

The issue is that there are so many different facets to mentoring: relationships, expertise, listening, advice to name a few. But what the Early Career Framework has prompted me to do is think about the cogntitive processes that underpin our mentoring decisions, strategies and actions we might take. There has been some excellent books written about mentoring in terms of the qualities of mentors, relationships, the differences between coaching and mentoring etc. but nothing I could find on cognitive science and the way novice teachers learn - that I could find anyway. I may be wrong! So it made me think about how the science of learning might help us as mentors to be more effective at developing our mentees and improving granular elements of their pedagogy. Some might say that this isn't really mentoring and it probably isn't, in its traditional sense. If coaching is getting someone from A to B then it is probably more like that. I think of myself drawing on strategies from mentoring and coaching interchangeably with the mentors and trainees I mentor and I think this model from Pask and Joy (2007), which is an oldie but a goodie, is a useful starting point:

There are times when there is reflection, discussion and blue sky thinking but there are also concrete action steps where we articulate the 'how' to improve; I like Bambrick-Santoyo's 'See it, Say it, Do it' here. So essentially, it is a coaching approach to mentoring. Part of this thinking for me has come from the excellent Deans for Impact paper 'The Science of Learning.' If you are looking for a concise, simply explained overview of principles of cognitive science, you can't go far wrong with this paper. So I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the ways students learn, understand and retain information and whether it can offer us any practical strategies we can use as mentors.

We learn new ideas by reference to ideas we already know (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000)

• It is important for mentors to have a good understanding of the Core Content Framework that ITE students will be using as their framework for learning and development and that you are acting as the bridge between theory and practice, so that you are able to give concrete examples and exemplifications of what they are learning. This will ensure you can build on their prior learning and help them master new ideas (Agodini, Harris, Atkins-Burnett, Heaviside, Novak and Murphy, 2009). 
• Use analogies from your own practice to help map new ideas onto ones trainees already know. But you need to elaborate on the analogies, and direct trainee's attention to the crucial similarities between their practice and where it needs to be (Richland, Zur and Holyoak, 2007).

To learn, we must transfer information from working memory (where it is consciously processed) to long-term memory (where it can be stored and later retrieved). We have limited working memory capacities that can be overwhelmed by tasks that are cognitively too demanding. Understanding new ideas can be impeded if we are confronted with too much information at once 

• Mentors can use 'worked examples' to reduce cognitive burdens.  This is a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or solve a problem and is a form of scaffolding. These scaffolds might be models of particular strategies or deconstruction of video exemplifications of practice. 
• Mentors can use multiple modalities to convey an idea. One example might be speaking while showing a graphic, or pausing a video. If mentors ensure that the two types of information complement one another, a novice teachers' learning is enhanced.
• Making strategies explicit through well paced, concise and clear explanations, modeling, and examples can help ensure that novice teachers are not overwhelmed.

Information is often withdrawn from memory just as it went in. We usually want students to remember what information means and why it is important, so they should think about meaning when they encounter to-be-remembered material

• Asking new teachers to explain their pedagogical choices or thought processes (e.g., answering questions about how or why something happened) will help them organise their thinking and create mental models. 

Practice is essential to learning new facts, but not all practice is equivalent 

• The sections of the Early Career Framework and Core Content Framework are not distinct areas of learning. There are huge amounts of overlap between each standard and they all underpin and feed into one another. Therefore, development can be revisited and spaced practice is a great way of doing this, with ideas being reviewed across the placement or two ECT years, so that mentees remember that content over the longterm.
• Interleaving may also help here, as if new teachers are focusing on setting high expectations and behaviour management, interleaving problems about different questioning types to probe and challenge or using the visualiser to model what excellence looks like could also be integrated. This means they are seeing visible connections between different skills sets and interleaving different strategies into their repertoire. This still means that they will work on one granular target but seeing the bigger picture of what great teaching and learning looks like is also important.

Effective feedback is often essential to acquiring new knowledge and skills 

• Good feedback is: 

1. Specific and clear; 
2. Focused on the task rather than the new teacher; and 
3. Explanatory and focused on improvement rather than merely verifying performance. So instead of  'Improve questioning' you will need to articulate 'how' rather than giving a vague, woolly comment. A target like that is like telling a Formula 1 driver to get round the track faster. Meaningless.

(Hattie and Timperley, 2007)

Beliefs about intelligence are important predictors of  behaviour

• Mentors can contribute to their mentee's beliefs about their ability to improve by praising productive effort and strategies in a specific way, rather than their ability.
• Mentors can prompt mentees to feel more in control of their learning by encouraging them to set specific learning goals themselves, facilitated by mentors who may need to use skilful questioning to help formulate these targets.

The ability to monitor their own thinking can help people identify what they do and do not know, but people are often unable to accurately judge their own learning and understanding 

• Mentors can engage new teachers in tasks that will allow them to reliably monitor their own learning but they may need to be taught how to be reflective, so that they can develop those skills. properly. 
• Looking at their own teaching and reflecting through different lenses may help scaffold and structure purposeful reflection. I am working on a resource to help with this with David Goodwin and IRIS Connect...so watch this space!

People will be more motivated and successful in academic environments when they believe that they belong and are accepted in those environments 

• If mentors can reassure their mentee that doubts about belonging are common and will diminish over time they will make them feel more secure. A practical way of doing this may be to facilitate your mentee getting more involved in school life, so that they can thrive rather than just survive.
• Encouraging your mentee to see feedback as a sign that we believe they are able to meet really high standards. Showing some humilty and vulnerability here as a mentor and modelling the idea that we are also on our own development journey can also help them see critical feedback as a necessary part of improvement.

There are so many more concepts about the science of learning and the processes that I think I could write a book on it...who knows...I might! When I have finished the 3 I am working on. But this is just the start of my musings on this. Hope it is useful.