A new book on mentorship for teacher candidates has recently been released by Springer (mock-up via Canva/UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR
By Kate Hargreaves
Dr. Clayton Smith, professor in the Faculty of Education, makes sure that his research is always in service of the courses he teaches.
“I don’t do research that I don’t use in my classes,” he explains.
With a dearth of material available on mentorship for pre-service teachers, Smith and professor emerita Dr. Geri Salinitri were motivated to co-edit a new collection, Mentoring to Support Teacher Candidate Development, recently published by Springer.
The book features contributions from 67 authors across Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, exploring how mentoring can support teacher candidate development.
The book's genesis was in Smith and Salinitri’s work teaching in the University of Windsor's concurrent education program, during which they created a mentoring program between first and fourth-year concurrent education students.
Immediately, they saw benefits for both mentors and mentees. However, there was a lack of literature to support the work they were doing.
“We decided to write this volume to support our teaching and to help others who might be considering teaching about mentoring to teacher candidates,” says Smith.
Mentoring, as Smith explains, extends beyond their program’s peer-to-peer mentorship into teachers’ eventual careers, with all stages covered in the new book.
“Students will be mentees as they go into their teacher education program,” says Smith. “They'll be mentors later in their teacher ed. They become mentees again when they become starting teachers and then hopefully when they're veteran teachers, they'll become mentors.”
Whether mentee or mentor at any given time, the benefits of these relationships are numerous, with Salinitri arguing that mentorship is central to the act of teaching.
“Teaching is about building relationships,” she says. “Starting that foundation early on is important.”
Salinitri’s work on mentorship goes back to her doctoral dissertation, in which she developed a mentorship program for first-year in-risk university students, finding that while the mentees benefited, so did those doing the mentoring.
“At the end, they felt they were better teachers because they had this one-on-one with students,” she explains.
“When we look at teaching today, our classrooms are filled with all kinds of kids: international second language students, kids with individual education plans, kids who are gifted, those who are motivated, those who are not motivated.
“You have a whole mix of students in your classroom, and to be a good teacher, you have to know how to work with each individual student. To do that you have to have the skills of mentoring.”
In editing the book, a conscious choice was made to represent these diverse types of learners and the various settings in which mentorship takes place.
Dr. Nesreen Elkord, an adjunct professor with the Faculty of Education, contributed a chapter on mentorship’s benefits to working with multilingual learners.
"For programs like ours at UWindsor, where candidates learn to work in increasingly multilingual and multicultural school contexts, resources that deepen mentoring capacity are essential,” Elkord explains.
Marium Tolson-Murtty, director of the Office of Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Mediation and a PhD student in the Faculty of Education, is also a contributor, focusing on mentorship of Black teacher candidates.
Tolson-Murtty explains that the low numbers of Black teachers and high rates of attrition are related to both a sense of isolation and marginalization, as well as not having representation and mentors in the profession.
She cites the value of having a Black woman as an unofficial mentor in her own path as an educator.
“You have Black people interested in teaching,” she says, “however, they don’t necessarily have a lot of Black teachers that are role models for them. How do you get them to become teachers if they don’t see a model and know someone else in the school system? It’s that vicious cycle.”
Tolson-Murtty emphasizes the power of mentorship for any underrepresented group.
“Everyone should be mindful of what your colleagues might be going through in the education system and what supports you could potentially offer budding teachers to help them navigate.”
Associate dean of graduate studies and research, Dr. Michael MacDonald, wrote his chapter on social-emotional learning (SEL) in relation to mentorship.
He emphasizes the need to embed SEL not only as standalone programming but in every aspect of teaching.
“Between teachers and within their schools, it’s a whole ecosystem that needs to be supported,” he explains. “It has to be mentoring for the mentors too and mentoring for leaders and the parents and the broader community.”
This broader ecosystem of mentoring is also reflected in a chapter by Dr. Finney Cherian and doctoral student Syed Zaidi who wrote on the potential for transformative mentorship models, centring collaboration between faculty advisors, associate teachers, and teacher candidates.
Their research challenges the artificial divide that exists between theory and practice in teacher education and highlights the importance of relationship-building and partnership between faculties of education and school systems.
“If we are safeguarding people’s dreams, curiosities and aspirations when they come to our faculty, we need to have certain things in place in preparation, so what we assume is independence doesn’t become abandonment in their reality,” says Cherian.
Cherian and Zaidi’s supervisory and co-authorship relationship itself is a testament to the value of mentorship.
“Mentorship starts with Syed and myself in a collaborative process where we actually sit side-by-side,” Cherian explains.
“He sees how I frame things, his questioning broadens my perspectives, he sees the full breadth of myself as a human being trying to work in this thing called the academy, which can be messy and strenuous and not gentle.”
These types of scholarly relationships also resonate with Salinitri, who notes that the editorial process for the book involved partnerships and mentorship of students.
She and co-editor Smith worked with two student editorial assistants, Ignite student Natalie Maxwell-Labute and Outstanding Scholar Damian Bossom.
“It took a team effort to make this happen,” Salinitri says.
After months of work, with the book finally available, Smith says that the plan is to use its content in course to support concurrent education students going forward.
Mentorship to Support Teacher Candidate Development is now available on the Springer website.