Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Mentors: The costs and benefits to Mentors and their Fidelity to Constructivist Practice

This paper was about a study that had been undertaken. The background to this was that 22% of California teachers leave the profession after the first four years and 10% of teachers in high poverty schools transfer to other schools each year. This is expected to continue and so this study wanted to explore things to increase teacher retention against the workload, low pay and poor class conditions. At present most states do have a new teacher induction programme and these are two years long and must be completed before a teacher can be fully certificated. This study was focused on the California Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) trained mentor. In California there are about 20 professional standard around teaching that have been developed.

There was some discussion of what the literature says bout Mentors and mentoring to make this positive. The purpose of this study was to examine the mentors role in the BTSA programme and explore the perceived costs and benefits of being a mentor. The sample was 143 trained BTSA mentors from various school districts. All mentors have to have 3 years experience and their supervisor has to suggest they would be good for the role as well as there being a subject match. The data was collected through a demographic questionnaire, a costs and benefits mentoring survey (Ragins & Scandura 1999) and a teaching philosophy and related beliefs about instructions and assessment questionnaire (Ravitz, Becker & Wong 2000). The analysis was undertaken using descriptive analysis of the costs and benefits, t-test to see if the teaching philosophy made a difference to how they mentored and a regressions analysis was conducted to determine if the teaching philosophy influenced costs and benefits perceptions.

The results were that mentors found the programme of being a mentor was beneficial rather than costly, those mentors who said they were constructivists found mentoring more beneficial but overall most mentors found this a rewarding experience and an opportunity for their own personal development. The implications of this research is the importance of mentors for this programme, importance of the match of philosophical tenets between the programme and the mentor and that more research is needed on the benefit for mentors.