ON-LINE MENTORING: A BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE IN TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Geneva, 13-15 September 2006

Authors:

Reali, Aline Maria de Medeiros Rodrigues (FederalUniversity of São Carlos)

Tancredi, Regina Maria Simões Puccinelli (FederalUniversity of São Carlos)

Mizukami, Maria da Graça Nicoletti (PresbyterianUniversity Mackenzie)

Abstract:

This paper examines the results of an investigation carried out by the researchers from a Brazilian public institution (Federal University of São Carlos) and experienced teachers using a research and intervention methodology adopted in an on-line continued teacher education program whose background was the development of mentoring activities to help novice teachers to lighten their everyday professional difficulties. The development of the On-line Mentoring Program has been a rather challenging process, but enriching as well. It has promoted the establishment of professional and affective bonds among the participants, the broadening of professional knowledge, the mastery of on-line adult education technologies and the participants’ professional growth. It should be remarked that it has been a much more complex enterprise than a face-to-face equivalent program would have been because it demands entirely new logistics and some challenges.

Introduction

Despite much investment in basic education in the past years, it is clear that the quality of education imparted to Brazilian children—even in developed urban centers—has been rather dismal, as indicated by numerous educational surveys. These surveys show that while indicators of student access and retention have dramatically improved in the past decades, in practice passing compares with failing failure

“[…] because students are lethargic; because they cannot think for themselves; because they cannot speak their own minds; because they just take notes and repeat other people’s thoughts. […] [Those who] succeed at school [...] are deemed as ‘good students’ only because they are able to parrot what their teacher says and does” (Dani & Isaía, 1997, p.1).

Not to mention the students who finish elementary school without having fully mastered their mother tongue and other fundamental contents, as shown by evaluations carried out by Brazilian state and federal agencies.

It is well known that school underachievement is a complex multiple-faceted phenomenon, and thus cannot be attributed to a single cause. However, it appears that teacher education plays an significant part in it. Despite the fact that there is no consensus with respect to how and how much teacher education influences student performance, this work presupposes that there is a strong relation between professional education and proficiency.

Bearing in mind that “learning to teach” and “being a teacher” are on-going and life-long processes, it is important to remark that teaching proficiency does not just derive from pre-service education. On the contrary, the literature indicates that proficient teaching is associated with the capacity to understand the other, students, curricular content, pedagogy, curriculum development, and strategies and techniques related to facilitating students’ learning.

Being a teacher does not encompass characteristics inherent to teaching alone, it goes beyond them: it involves participating in the school, the locus of the professional community par excellence (Knowles, Cole & Presswood, 1994). Hence, taking into consideration the characteristics of teaching and being a teacher as well as those of today’s world, it is vital that teachers be supported to be able to evolve professionally during their careers.

The literature on teacher education also points to the existence of different phases in teachers’ career. These phases display unique characteristics and problems; future, novice and experienced teachers show distinct professional competencies and different educational necessities. Notwithstanding, continued education programs have traditionally taken teacher education—even when held at the workplace—as an undifferentiated whole, thus failing to place proper emphasis on the peculiarities of different career phases.

This work investigates teachers’ educational specificities at different career phases by means of a program to help novice teachers to lighten their everyday professional difficulties. This on-line support is given to novices by experienced teachers (mentors) asynchronously. It assumes that teacher education and on-line education can promote changes in elementary education, and consequently help to alter the present picture of student underachievement in Brazil.

The First Years of Teaching, How They Relate to Pre-Service Education, and Mentorship as a Tool for Professional Development and Change

Every year a great number of novice teachers enter the job market and face the challenge of having to educate a multiplicity of students in a society increasingly focused on knowledge and technology. According to Day (1999), irrespective of the spaces where teaching and learning processes take place, good teachers—i.e., those concerned about teaching and their students’ learning, committed to their professional development, and capable of providing their students with proper frameworks—will always be in great demand. In addition, today’s teachers are not only required to impart knowledge so that their students may perform well at exams, but also to teach them to solve problems and integrate knowledge and understanding into situations where the difference between students and teachers is feeble.

According to Darling-Hammond (1997), it is necessary that teachers learn from their students, by studying, doing and reflecting in collaboration with colleagues, and by carefully observing their students and their work and sharing what they learn.The literature point out that teachers as well as students actively construct their modes of knowing, and these modes operate as maps of their worlds (Day, 1999).

In view of these demands it is important to reexamine the role of initial education and its aspects that concern teachers’ professional development and learning. It seems that today’s pre-service teacher education can only offer a weak antidote to the overwhelming—and often defective—socialization process that teachers experience as students (Ball & Cohen, 1999). Many times these experiences differ from what the literature indicates as desirable and adequate to today’s school scenarios. Thus, it is essential that teacher education should help these professionals to transcend what they experienced as elementary and secondary students as well as in teacher education.

In Brazil, formal teaching systems—including secondary and teacher education courses—usually include teaching-learning situations that are quite distinct from those found in ordinary classrooms. Teacher students’ first insertions in schools are usually episodic and de-contextualized. Practicums and training experiences are generally involve artificial teaching and professional situations. After a long period of planning and preparation teacher students do their “teaching” in artificial situations in which students are sometimes told how to behave, which only evidences the technical rationality basis of most teacher education programs in Brazil.

It is a fact that skills, competencies and knowledges essential for effective teaching cannot be fully developed during basic or teacher education programs. In most teacher education programs, pedagogical content courses and practicums are often preceded by, and thus segregated from, specific content courses. This lack of integration between theoretical and practical-pedagogic content courses compromises the connection between theory and practice.

Furthermore, teacher students’ insertion in practical classroom and practicum situations is delayed by the programs, and there is too little time is allocated to it. This is detrimental to teacher education because classrooms supply teachers with highly relevant learning opportunities. Indeed, classrooms should be perceived as central learning environments, in which students continuously receive information, respond to teachers’ requests, and actively participate in constructing their knowledge in highly dynamic contexts.

Due to the aforementioned instructional shortcomings in initial teacher education and the fact that there are no educational policies towards effective teaching induction, this work assumes that continued teacher education should be emphasized. This work also presupposes that teacher education should encourage teachers, individually and collectively, to reflect upon their conceptions, beliefs, ideas and practices, and be in responsible for their own professional development in environments that promote self-directed learning and sharing of knowledge. In addition, this work advances the opinion that continued teacher education programs should provide teachers with time, space and support from experienced professionals—those who have already gone through the initial phases of teaching, and have overcome obstacles towards proficiency.

The deficiencies found in different basic and continued teacher education initiatives reinforce the need for support to teachers, especially novices. The importance of this support becomes more apparent when one considers that teachers act in a complex, uncertain and changing world, whose problems cannot solved by mere application of available theoretical-technical knowledge, as spoused by adepts of the technical rationality model. Taking effective action in these circumstances demands constant decision making and construction of solutions, which, in turn, involve prioritizing, organizing and evaluating often contradictory issues, and proposing reasonable actions (Schön, 1987).

The first years of teaching are marked by processes of survival, discovery, adaptation and learning. It is a period of conflict and intensive learning in unknown contexts (Marcelo Garcia, 1999), when teachers stop being students to become professionals with specific competencies and knowledge. Novice teachers may be characterized as optimistic, positive and hopeful, though they sometimes entertain romantic representations of their role.

Novice teachers face a multiplicity of challenges and demands, which impact the development of their practices and their convictions about their role. The necessary transition from student life to being a teacher entails a period of professional and personal doubts and tensions known as “reality shock”, “transition shock” or “cultural shock” (Tardif & Raymond, 2000). This period varies in duration: 1-3 years (Huberman, 1995) or 1-4 years (Gonçalves, 1995).

Novice teachers face paradoxical situations because as professionals they are expected to display skills and knowledges that have not been fully developed. During the first years they have to perform numerous tasks, such as socializing in the school system, building up the teacher role, and constructing their professional identity, which involve bi-directional processes.

Moreover, novice teachers’ work appears to be influenced by multiple variables. These variables are related to their personal and schooling histories, classes taught (students, contents, teacher-student relationships etc.), schools (peers, administration, curriculum etc), and broader social context (educational policies, economic and social environment etc.). In order to survive in this complex setting, they often conceive routes that are not necessarily conducive to good teaching and/or permanence in the career.

On top, there is evidence in Brazil that the first years of teaching constitute a particularly complex period, because novice teachers are usually assigned the most difficult classes in the most troublesome schools. Notwithstanding these complications, novices are hardly ever provided with institutional support. When this support is ever given it is more likely to come from caring colleagues.

In fact, novice teachers’ routines indicate that this period poses problems that schools are not expected to deal with or follow closely. Schools are not supposed to supply novice teachers with the kind of systematic support that will enable them to cope with this period more easily. Nor are educational systems, teachers’ professional unions or teacher education programs; these agencies do not usually foster policies that may smooth the “passage” from student teacher to practicing teacher. Furthermore, there is a great shortage—at all levels and in all educational systems—of public policies that take into account the characteristics of the first years of teaching.

Although novice teachers have been the object of numerous international research projects, this theme is still rather scarce in Brazil. There have also been few investigations on how to minimize difficulties inherent to this phase through support programs involving more experienced teachers (mentors). As a matter of fact, the authors could not find any studies about experienced teachers assisting other teachers in their teaching.

It is possible to find several initiatives to support novice teachers in the literature such as mentorship or induction programs. These programs attempt to help novice teachers to analyze their professional knowledge base and seek adequate means to broaden it so as to promote their students’ learning. Assisting novice teachers via mentorship programs has been investigated and adopted in many countries, e.g., the USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand, England (Pacheco & Flores, 1999), Spain (Marcelo Garcia, 1999) and Canada (Knowles, Cole & Presswood, 1994). These countries also foster public policies that facilitate novices’ induction into teaching. Brazil has no such policies, in spite of international research indicating that novice teachers who have been through mentorship programs—with orientated practical learning instead of learning by trial and error—become more effective and committed teachers.

Although mentoring may apply to all phases of the teaching career, it is possible to define a mentorship or induction program as a set of formative activities—following pre-service education—that aim at assisting teachers throughout their first professional years (induction period). According to Marcelo Garcia (1999), a mentorship program is based on three components: a teaching and formative concept; a set of knowledges deemed as important to novice teachers; and a concept of teacher learning and how it may be accomplished. Additional components may be: classroom situations and dilemmas likely to be encountered by novice teachers; tasks and goals of mentorship; professional profile; mentors’ role; and professional education as well as limitations.

In some programs there are constant meetings between mentors and novice teachers, whereas in others these situations are more infrequent. At any rate, it is not the frequency of meetings what counts, but the quality of the interactions. Induction programs may vary as regards conception, organization and functioning. They may be based on “effective teaching”, implying direct instruction about skills and specific contents to novice teachers by more experienced teachers. They may also be based on more complex teaching experiences, perhaps leading to the reorganization of school environments to promote in-depth changes in teachers’ knowledge base. In these cases a constructivist model that emphasizes reflective and collaborative practice is recommended because this model is said to improve novice teachers’ teaching repertoires (Wang & Odell, 2002).

It should be remarked that many of these experiences presuppose a unidirectional concept of mentoring: experienced teachers teaching novices. This work advocates, on the other hand, the perspective of reciprocal development, in which professionals at different levels of experience help to as well as learn from the organization of a learning community.

The first perspective implicitly establishes differences and distances between mentors and teachers, whereas the second one enhances connections between professionals in different career phases. In a collaborative environment, experienced and novice teachers—working together and sharing ideas about real problems—put their common knowledge base into action and experience relations between theory and practice together (Weiss & Weiss, 1999), i.e., novice teachers and mentors contribute to each other’s professional development.

Selecting mentors is central to the successful development and implementation of mentorship programs. Mentors should be expert teachers, experienced in daily classroom situations and school matters; those who are capable of helping novices to learn the school philosophy and cultural values as well as of demonstrating a repertoire of professional behaviors expected by the school community. They can counsel and orientate novice teachers, provide general information, look for/suggest teaching materials, supervise practices, propose solutions to problems, and share experiences by establishing and maintaining significant interactions. However, despite the fact that good mentorship programs depend heavily on their mentors’ qualifications, there is scarce literature on how to prepare them, i.e., little is known about the education of teacher educators.

On the other hand, notwithstanding indications that novice teachers should be motivated to examine their beliefs about teaching and learning to teach, to construct teaching practices consistent with research findings, and to develop the disposition to learn how to teach, this work assumes that mentoring goes beyond helping novices to learn how to teach. It presupposes that mentoring is also an excellent opportunity for mentors to grow professionally. In this direction, only on should mentors be prepared to develop interpersonal and reflection skills in their interactions with novices, but also to acquire skills and the disposition to teach theoretical notions and concepts of other natures.

In this perspective, reflective practice, be it individual or collective, is of great significance, i.e., “processes of teaching knowledge production from practical situations” should be valued and seen as “the starting and finishing point” (Pimenta, 2002, p.22) to the teaching of curricular contents, considering the possibilities and limitations that school, social, economic, historic and political contexts impose both on pedagogical actions and on reflecting on them.

Distance Education: The Internet as a Tool for Novice Teachers’ Education

Distance education (DE) may be a valid response to the increasing demand for quality continued professional education, but it is always not less expensive or more effective than face-to-face education, as it is sometimes postulated. Moreover, the choice between face-to-face and on-line modes of instruction is neither simple nor exclusive; some programs may have to adopt a hybrid model. In any case, distance education has the advantage of being capable of reaching many more students than face-to-face instruction can. Besides, DE can also complement face-to-face education, broaden the knowledge spectrum, and reach people who may not be able to attend school.

Distance education has many definitions. For instance, Marcelo (2002) defines it as a collection of methods particularly suitable to adult education, in which personal experience with respect to a given content may play a relevant role in collective learning. DE is an educational process in which two elements are fundamental: time and space, i.e., teachers and students—or students and students—are separated by time and space in DE (Ramal, 2003).