Mentoring and Coaching Practices for Beginner Teachers—A Need for Mentor Coaching Skills Training and Principal’s Support

Abstract

Mentoring and coaching seem to have taken over many other forms of job embedded professional development programmes across the globe. Mentoring involves providing professional and personal guidance to an assigned mentee. Coaching involves providing focused career assistance to a coachee. This paper focuses on sharing current mentoring and coaching services provided particularly for beginner teachers. Beginner teachers face variety of issues and challenges in their early years of teaching. These initial experiences determine the new teachers’ sustainability, teaching quality and students’ performance. Effective beginner teacher mentoring and coaching includes guidance in areas of professional (career, skills and expertise) and personal (work/life balance, self-confidence, self-perception, and personal influences) development. This concept paper presents an overview of current mentoring and coaching practices for beginner teachers. The study further implies the need for providing mentors with mentor coaching skills training and principals support based on the Kansas Coaching Model underpinning the principles of Adult Learning Theory to improve current mentoring and coaching practices.