Re-Imagining Mentoring: Mutual Shaping and Dialogic Collaboration as Key Components of the Mentoring Process

New teachers frequently encounter challenges in the profession, especially in making the shift from pre-service teacher to in-service teacher. One approach that this study presents to addressing these prevailing challenges is to provide opportunities, contexts, and structures for collaboration and dialogue in professional learning environments, including mentoring contexts, for new and experienced teachers alike. The purpose of this study was to develop understandings related to how new and experienced teachers conceptualize mentoring in order to identify the range of mentoring practices being employed and consider the role of collaboration in mentoring practices. In this way, I was able to consider the role this collaborative approach might play in addressing new teacher challenges. The theoretical framework underpinning this research utilized theories and concepts from Bakhtin (1981, 1986), Fecho (2011), Fecho et al. (2021), Rosenblatt (1995), and Feiman-Nemser (2001, 2003) that worked together as a lens to examine the active dialogue that must take place in order for new teachers and experienced teachers alike to learn and grow as educators and individuals in a world of varying contexts, languages, and cultures. Data generation methods included observations, interviews, and reflective writing prompts designed to elicit data related to teachers' conceptions of and experiences with mentoring and collaboration. This study addressed the following research questions: (1) In assigned mentor-mentee pairs, what kinds of practices are occurring that are supposed to be nurturing developmental growth? and (2) What role might productive collaboration play in nurturing developmental growth in assigned mentoring pairs? The generated data indexed the crucial role that productive collaboration rooted in dialogue plays in effective mentoring. Analysis of the data led to the generation of five dialogical characteristics of productive collaboration that I view as crucial for nurturing developmental growth in the context of mentoring: Openness to mutual shaping through transaction, common goal, shared decision-making, reflection-on-action, and a consideration of future actions. Four contextual features were identified as playing a significant role in the productivity of collaboration in the mentoring process. The identified contextual features influencing productive collaboration included the following: Hierarchies, teaching experience, school structures and systems, and the social environment of the school. Implications of this study reflect the importance of the five dialogical characteristics to mentoring and collaboration and how new teacher mentees and experienced teacher mentors may benefit from their intentional participation in productive collaboration.