How to be a Brilliant Mentor (2^nd Ed.) Developing Outstanding Teachers

How to be a Brilliant Mentor is an informal and accessible guide that provides ideas and reassurance to help support you in your work as a teacher training mentor. Written by experienced trainers, teachers and mentors, it brings together a wealth of expertise and research, offering clear and practical guidelines to enhance your mentoring, helping you to analyse your own practice and understand the complex and often ambiguous role of the mentor in school.

The second edition includes new chapters on school-based training routes, dealing with their advantages and challenges, and on developing trainees through risk taking. All chapters have been updated to refer to the new National Standards for school-based initial teacher training (ITT) mentors.Offering practical strategies and direct problem-solving to help you move promising trainees quickly beyond mere competence, it explores:

• giving effective feedback
• emotional intelligence and developing and maintaining relationships
• collaborative working
• dealing with critical incidents
• developing reflective practice
• what to do if relationships break down
• the relationship between coaching and mentoring
• mentoring newly qualified teachers (NQTs) as well as trainees.

Illustrated with the experiences of real trainees, How to be a Brilliant Mentor can be dipped into for innovative mentoring ideas or read from cover to cover as a short enjoyable course which will give you added confidence in your mentoring role.

The book is a companion to How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher, also by Trevor Wright.

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

1. The pivotal importance of the mentor
2. Inputs and outputs
3. Collaborative working: the heart of good mentoring
4. Reflective practice: the mentoring conversation
5. Emotional intelligence

6. Mentoring together

7. Challenging the competent trainee: taking risks in the classroom

8. School-based initial teacher training

9. Mentoring and coaching: the helping relationship

10. Mentoring in a primary school

11. Mentoring the newly qualified teacher

12. Dear Mentor…

Suggested reading

Trevor Wright is a Senior Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Secondary Education at the University of Worcester, UK.