Reframing High-Quality Mentoring: Between Teacher Mentoring and Visions of Teaching as a Profession

Abstract

Visions of teacher professionalism may shape common conceptualizations of high-quality mentoring, sometimes distortedly. Nevertheless, this relationship is often unnoticed, and studies rarely analyze mentor–teachers’ work according to their interrelating visions. This multiple case study aimed at this literature gap. It examined the goals that accomplished mentor-teachers promoted and their practices and found four mentoring styles that characterized these mentors. After, it interrogated how the mentoring styles interrelated with three distinct visions of teacher professionalism (teachers as intellectuals, craftspeople, or artists). Findings challenge the idea that mentor-teachers’ work can be evaluated as either advancing or degrading teacher professionalism. The study questions this framing of mentoring literature and suggests that a bipolar logic could mislead us to forsake essential aspects of mentoring, for instance, ones associated with apprenticeship relations. The study concludes by offering to replace the bipolar logic with a more balanced consideration of the different aspects of teacher mentoring.