Beyond Mentoring

Abstract

Support for music teachers new to the profession is important and necessary. Some school districts use traditional mentor–mentee pairings as their primary support for novice music teachers; however, many factors in the professional lives of music teachers, such as traveling among multiple schools or a lack of subject-specific colleagues often makes this type of mentoring problematic. This review of literature synthesizes the research on music teacher mentoring and suggests that avenues such as face-to-face professional learning communities of music teachers and virtual communities of practice be further researched and explored as an augmentation of the mentoring framework in the support of novice music teachers.