First blog in a new series! A mentoring lens
In both of my jobs I am privileged to work with thousands of mentors every year and aside from having the time to do their jobs, one of the greatest challenges they always say they face is being able to bridge that gap between research and practice. Most mentors engage with research and read lots of papers, blogs and books but there is so much out there, that it can sometimes be difficult to see the wood for the trees. Having the time to consider and discuss the implications of academic research on our own practice, let alone articulate what the implications might perhaps be for other's practice is a gift that not many school based mentors are given. They would like to do more of it, but this work gets lost in amongst the other competing jobs a mentor has, which are all jostling for their limited time.
So here's the thing...I am unbelievably lucky to be able to think deeply about this stuff and to have the time as part of my role as England's only Principal Lecturer in mentoring, to read lots and discuss things with brilliant people across the sector. Alongside a new year's resolution to blog much more this year, I decided to write a weekly series, where I look at some seminal education papers and discuss what I think the implications might be for mentors - hopefully saving them the heavy lifting, when they are already so stretched. Of course, these will only be my ramblings and I welcome any discussion and feedback. In a world of bitesize theory and one pagers, of course many mentors may still wish to read the full paper and come up with their own conclusions. Frustratingly, papers are often behind paywalls. This is one of my biggest bugbears in education. If teachers are being encouraged to be evidence-led, then why not give them full access to the evidence? Therefore, I will always provide a link to the full paper on each blog post. So, to start off the series, a concept I think is really important for mentors...the expertise reversal effect.
The expertise reversal effect
What?
As we know, novices and experts think differently (Deans for Impact, 2015). Experts have a level of automaticity when they are completing basic tasks, or processing information, which in turn frees up the cognitive space to tackle more complex problems. As they possess expertise, this allows them to recognise patterns, and in turn organise knowledge quite differently from novices. So for example, a more experienced teacher may find the basic routines and steps of teaching become automatic, they are able to anticipate what pupil misconceptions may arise during the lesson and adapt their teaching to ensure that they are addressed. In addition, they may be able to deal with disruptive behaviour more effectively, as they have encountered similar behaviour before - they have weapons in their arsenal so to speak and it isn't their first time at the rodeo. They have a tried and tested expertise of what has worked before and they can draw from this latticework of mental models, or sophisticated schema, to re-use strategies with some confidence that they may work again. There is a great blog from Ambition Institute (2020) which explains this in the context of a school leader, which is well worth a read.
Of course, lessons and school life in general, has an element of un-predictability and as expert teachers have the routine covered, they have the cognitive space to act should any surprises crop up. For a novice teacher, such as a trainee or ECT, this may be much more challenging. If the instructional guidance given by mentors fails to provide the necessary support, novice teachers will have to resort to 'problem-solving search strategies that are cognitively inefficient because they impose a heavy working memory load' (Kalyuga et al., 2003: 24). I am an English teacher at heart and I love a metaphor, so to use the analogy of cooking, we get a weekly Gousto box and inevitably, there are often ingredients missing. I can follow a recipe but I would definitely call myself a novice cook. Whereas, my husband is much more accomplished, and when ingredients are missing, he is able to choose something from the cupboard which does the trick, as he has more expertise. He is able to bring his 'activated schemas to the process of constructing mental representations' (Kalyuga et al., 2003: 25) so that he knows what to substitute without ruining the food.
Back to the expertise reversal effect. It is commonly understood that novices need more strategies which reduce cognitive load, such as scaffolds. So, in the case of mentoring, novice teachers may need to observe and deconstruct strategies with their mentor, discussing the active ingredients and practising before they have a go themselves. As novice teachers become more expert though, these strategies can become a hindrance and even have a negative effect. So, why is this important for mentors to know? Well, since the launch of the Early Career Framework (2019), novice teachers have three years of statutary training, instead of the rather unjoined up two that they used to receive. The way we mentor ECTs in the second year, may be quite different to our mentoring in the first year, or our mentoring of ITT students.
So what?
So in practical terms, what implications does this have? Firstly, the worked examples mentors provide of particular strategies may be quite different. A worked example is a 'step by step demonstration of how to perform a task or how to solve a problem' (Clark, Nguyen, Sweller, 2006: 190). For most mentors, this is the bread and butter of their support, it underpins a lot of what we do. For example, our mentee might be struggling with questioning and with skilful conversations with the mentor, may narrow this focus down to struggling to stretch and challenge students through questioing. The mentor may model in a mentor meeting how they may do this themselves - possibly using some shared language of strategies such as 'stretch it' or 'right is right' (Lemov, 2015). They may then deconstruct the model together to look at each step, with the mentor making their thinking visible by narrating their thought processes at each step. However, as novice teachers gain more expertise and knowledge about what effective higher level questioing actually looks like, it may be more effective for mentors to show them a short video clip of this strategy in action and ask them what they notice, rather than providing too much guidance. This is because giving our mentees problems to solve themselves after they have developed expertise is actually much more effective (Renkl and Atkinson, 2003). I love to show my mentees non-examples at this stage also and ask them to draw on their expertise to suggest what they might do differently. This is a great opportunity to also challenge their thinking and get them to articulate their own mental models.
Furthermore, when we are first modelling a particular strategy or technique to our mentees, we may provide more than one source of information, such as a live model, a video recording or even some research/ practitioner blog. These scaffolds help to compensate for the lack of information on the strategy in the mentee's long term memory. However, as the novice teacher builds more expertise, the model from the mentor could be removed, as it could become redundant. Instead, mentors could ask their mentee to recall or reflect on a critical incident in their own lesson and articulate which strategy they used and why, leading to some scenario work related to their current target. If a model is no longer required from the mentor, it may instead impose an additional cognitive load on novice teachers, which impedes on their development. Attending to this now redundant information would require using some cognitive resources, which instead would be much more effectively used for constructing and refining new or pre-existing schemas.
The same might be true for other forms of instructional guidance, such as setting targets. When starting out, mentees might need support setting granular targets for themselves and also in understanding how they get from A to B - so essentially, the 'what' and the 'how.' As a novice teacher gains more of a mental model of what effective teaching looks like, a more minimal guidance format might be more beneficial; they are able to use their schema-based knowledge as guidance, without overloading working memory. Obviously, continue to discuss targets but mentors may find that their mentees are much more equiped to set their own targets and are also able to accurately diagnose what the gaps are between their own performance and that of a more experienced teacher with more minimal guidance from mentors.
Many mentors may support both trainee teachers and ECTs and this paper reveals information about the 'isolated or interacting elements effect' which may be useful. Both the Early Career Framework and the Core Content Framework are structured around the Teacher Standards and training providers have grouped these into blocks which compliment one another, such as 'Behaviour' and 'Setting High Expectations.' Often this block, based around Standards 1 and 7, is the first taught block for first year ECTs. Obviously, this makes sense, as without creating the climate for effective learning, it is very difficult for any meaningful learning to occur. Yet the Teaching Standards are not discreet entities which fit into little neat boxes, they are structurally complex with much overlap...how can a climate of high expectations be created for example, if teachers are not aware of prior knowledge? New teachers must process many interacting elements of information simultaneously in their working memory to understand how to teach. In any one interaction in the classroom, there are a number of elements that must be attended to; some of these elements can be learned individually, such as meeting and greeting, or smooth lesson expositions, and this does not impose a heavy cognitive load. Yet, for high-element interactivity material, such as teaching to the top, which also requires using formative assessment effectively, understanding prior knowledge and strong subject knowledge, individual elements from different Standards interact and so must be learned simultaneously rather than as individual elements. This can result in quite a heavy working memory load. This is why it is so hard for trainees in their first placement to draw all of these elements together, and mentor models and worked examples are so vital at this stage. Yet for ECTs, they hold more previously acquired domain-specific schemas, where sets of interacting elements are incorporated into a schema, regardeded as a single element. They may no longer need to attend to each of the elements and learn all interactions between the elements individually and this schema can now act as a single element every time the ECTs encounters similar tasks or situations. This is why having a shared language for these single elements is so vital because they are much easier to recall when there is clarity. Therefore, mentoring support will need to be adapted accordingly to account for this. I am not really convinced this is happening, as when I speak to thousands of ECTs every year, many complain that they sometimes feel patronised and that they are simply repeating their ITT year, with little adjustment for prior learning and their previous expertise.
Now what?
The key takeaway message for mentors from this paper is that their instructional design, or levels of guidance and support should take into account the levels of their mentee's expertise. An ITT student will certainly not need the same approach as a second year ECT. This can be complicated even further when an ITT student has been working as a Teaching Assistant or unqualified teacher for many years, which is also a common scenario. If schools are providing their own in-house training and support for novice teachers, on top of the national ECF programme, scaffolds such as detailed worked examples should be gradually faded out and replaced with more problem-based learning, as novice teachers gain more knowledge (Renkl & Atkinson, 2003). The fading is important here, as Renkl, Atkinson, Maier, and Staley (2002) found that a fading out is much more effective than an abrupt switch from worked examples to problems. This abrupt switch is what a whole generation of teachers (including me) experienced when they left ITT and were chucked into the deep end of teaching without a life raft - let's not go back to those days please!
People often ask me what approach to mentoring I would advocate and I often shy away from advocating one as we really need to be responsive. With ITT trainees, I often use principles from Bambrick-Santoyo's work, especially the 'Six-Step Feedback' process. We have adapted this at the University of Sunderland and ask all our mentors to use it (you can find a bookmark here). However, as the mentoring relationship becomes much more of a partnership, I find Jim Knight's Impact Cycle to be much more effective. But there is no hard and fast rule. I am really interested in what I have read so far about Josh Goodrich's Responsive Coaching Model and look forward to finding out more about it when the book is released.
References:
Ambition Institute (2020) 'The School Leader: Using mental models effectively.' Available here: https://www.ambition.org.uk/blog/school-leader-using-mental-models-effectively/
Clark, R. C., Nguyen, F., & Sweller, J. (2006) Efficiency in learning: Evidence-based guidelines to manage cognitive load. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
Deans for Impact (2015) 'The Science of Learning.' Available here: https://deansforimpact.org/resources/the-science-of-learning/
Lemov, D. (2015) Teach Like a Champion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Renkl, A., & Atkinson, R. K. (2003) 'Structuring the transition from example study to problem solving in cognitive skill acquisition: A cognitive load perspective.' Educational Psychologist, 38(1), pp. 15–22.
Renkl, A., Atkinson, R. K., Maier, U. H., & Staley, R. (2002) 'From example study to problem solving: Smooth transitions help learning.' Journal of Experimental Education, 70(4), pp. 293–315
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