Educative mentoring: Exploring the articulation and enactment of the concept of educative mentoring with mentors and student teachers

Williams, Susan (2025) Educative mentoring: Exploring the articulation and enactment of the concept of educative mentoring with mentors and student teachers. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.

PDF Susan Mary Williams Final Submsiion EdD Thesis November 23rd 2025.pdf Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (2MB)

Abstract

Effective mentoring is an essential cornerstone when supporting the progress and development of teachers right from the start of their careers. Despite an abundance of initiatives intended to support this, concern remains over teacher recruitment and retention. This case study explored six mentor pairs’ (school mentor and student teacher) articulation and enactment of ‘educative mentoring’. This is where the mentor and student teacher operate within a constructivist-oriented model of mentoring, developing a partnership where the mentor and student teacher engage in a joint enquiry into the pedagogy of what is going on in the classroom; practices such as co-planning, looking at
children’s work and encouraging the student teacher and mentor to justify their practice are employed. Three research questions were set:
1. What perceptions do mentors and student teachers have of mentoring and educative mentoring in particular?
2. What educative mentoring practices are enacted by mentors and student teachers during the mentoring relationship?
3. What supports the mentor relationship to be conducive to educative mentoring?
Data were collected by online semi structured interviews with each mentor and student teacher. This was then followed by, for each mentor pair, the observation of a mentor meeting, a lesson delivered by the student teacher and the lesson debrief. The data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2022) Reflexive Thematic Analysis. From this analysis the following four findings were discussed further:
1. None of the participants recognised the term educative mentoring but when educative mentoring was explained to them, all the participants could give examples from practice of educative mentoring practices.
2. Educative mentoring practices that could be articulated by the participants during their interview, were observed in practice (mentor meeting or lesson debrief) as well as practices that had not been articulated.
3. The relational aspects of mentoring, dominated both the mentors’ and student teachers’ perceptions of mentoring but this element of mentoring appeared to be more important to student teachers than their mentors.
4. The characteristics and experiences of the mentor pairs and ‘mentorability’ of the student teacher, did appear to influence the enactment of educative mentoring practices.
The findings suggest that educative mentoring is one way mentoring can be strengthened by the establishment of collaborative reciprocity between the mentor and student teacher. The following facilitate this: adopting the student teacher into the school community, mentors that can justify their pedagogy and develop a pedagogical relationship with the student teacher and develop a bi focal lens. A future longitudinal study working with mentors as they develop
these and their enactment of educative mentoring is recommended.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	24 Nov 2025 09:28
Last Modified:	24 Nov 2025 09:28
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4800

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