What's
it about?
The dissertation research focuses on
the telementoring experiences of ten new teachers who took part in the WINGS
telementoring program at University of Texas for 15
months to 24 months. (The name WINGS is an acronym for "Welcoming
Interns and
Novices with Guidance and Support," and refers to the eligibility for
the online mentoring program of undergraduate student teachers doing
their practice teaching as well as newly certified recently graduated
teachers during their first two years of teaching. The maximum
period of official eligibility for WINGS telementoring was thus three
years.)
The online
mentors were experienced K-12 teachers in the Texas public school
system who
had volunteered to telementor new teachers and had submitted a profile
of
themselves to the WINGS Online database. From this online
database, the new teachers selected their own mentors according to
their perceptions of their needs as new teachers and what the available
mentors in the database offered that could help them meet these needs.
(Finding: most of the new teachers chose mentors who had grade or
subject matter teaching assignments similar to their own, although a
few chose as mentors those whose perceived personalities matched their
own but who had dissimilar teaching assignments.) The WINGS
program provided each protégé and mentor with
an e-mail address they could use to route their messages, and with
their permission archived all of their messages. This
voluminous correspondence exchange (more than 2,000 pages of messages)
via e-mail provided the greater part of the data about the new
teachers' experiences, supplemented by interviews and e-mail
information from the new-teacher protégés, and informed by the information
provided by the mentor teachers' and protégé
teachers' profile information submitted to WINGS at the time of the
forming of the protégé-mentor pair.
Major findings of the study
- Why the new teachers
chose telementoring: The participating novice teachers
sought
induction support online largely because they felt highly vulnerable
when
asking for assistance or support in their own school environments,
perceiving such requests as possibly exposing them to risks (such as
negative judgments about them or their competence)
from on-campus colleagues, their assigned mentors, or their
administrative supervisors. With their telementors, the new
teachers felt that they could ask about or discuss anything they liked
without risk of repercussions to them in their school environments.
- What the new teachers
felt they gained from their telementoring
experience: The
protégé
teachers generally felt that their telementors helped them by providing
profession-related developmental assistance, ranging from practical
teaching suggestions the new teachers could immediately apply in their
classrooms to general suggestions that helped them assimilate into the
social and professional cultures of teaching. The majority of
these novice teachers also felt that their telementors provided them
with valuable personal and emotional support, characterized by
qualitites that included caring, attentiveness, and positivity.
The most successful of these ten mentoring relationships -- seven of
the ten examined -- grew into collaboratively reflective
professional-development exchanges.
- Reasons that helped
this particular telementoring model to be successful:
Facilitation provided to the protégé-mentor pairs by
WINGS staff members was important in preventing telementoring teams'
correspondence from faltering and in resolving technical problems that
disrupted telecommunications connections. These interruptions and
problems occurred more frequently than had been expected, and thus the
role of an on-hand mediator and technical problem-solver was more
critical than is often provided for in other kinds of telementoring.
Contact
Lynda about this study
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