MENTORS’ PERSPECTIVE ON MENTORING PRACTICES FOR NEW TEACHERS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

This qualitative phenomenological research study explores the lived experiences of mentors as they share their perceptions of mentoring practices to better understand how participatory experiences affect the professional growth of new teachers. Using a phenomenological research design helps to better understand the participants’ perceptions and personal meaning making processes that emerge from their first-person lived experiences of their professional practice. This study explores how ongoing participatory experiences have served to shape one’s perceptions about teaching and learning though the use of best mentoring practice strategies. To this end, this study triangulates the data by conducting an initial email interview questionnaire with nine mentors who have extensively engaged in the sharing of their best pedagogical practices with new teachers (mentees), and each is able to discuss their experiences in depth, through review of mentors’ semi-structured interview questions responses, classroom observation reports, fieldnotes, follow-up interviews, and personal reflections. This research adds to the current literature on the topic of mentoring practices for novice teachers by examining each mentors’ experiences from a phenomenological perspective. This research also fills a gap in the existing literature as this specific topic is under-researched