Socio-Cultural Influences on Face-to-Face and Electronic Mentoring of New Teachers Learning to Teach

256 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The findings showed that the teachers highly valued the mentors' emotional support and rated their assistance on classroom management, engaging student learning and teaching methods most helpful in both face-to-face mentoring and e-mentoring. The findings also showed that new teachers focused more on classroom management issues in the beginning of the school year and migrated towards improving teaching methods and motivating student learning later. The mentoring suggestions that new teachers implemented in their classroom showed similar changes. However, new teachers gave a lower rating to the helpfulness of e-mentoring as compared to face-to-face mentoring and implemented fewer e-mentoring suggestions. In teachers' teaching contexts, the opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, the principal's leadership style, the university supervisor's evaluations and the teacher's efforts to monitor and reflect on his/her teaching and student progress were all found to affect new teachers learning to teach. The researcher suggested that in addition to emotional support, face-to-face mentors provide more visualized guidance and challenge new teachers' beliefs and practices of teaching and learning to help them grow and improve. As for the e-mentoring assistance, more personal connection between new teachers and e-mentors, more organized discussions on practice-based, grade-level and subject specific topics, options for anonymous postings and more experienced teacher participants could help attract and enhance genuine participation and authentic discussions from new teachers. This study raised the issue of the importance of mentors engaging new teachers in a jointly authored dialogue that gave new teachers ownership of their learning process and knowledge construction.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD