Is it time to rethink the recipe?
If you’ve been mentoring for over a decade, you typically tend to feel confident when taking on a new PGCE student. They’re young, idealistic, wide-eyed, and ready to hang on your every word as you appear magician-like to conjure insightful questions out of thin air, engage students effortlessly and behaviour manage with a death stare worthy of Miss Trunchbull.
However, this year, I found myself with an entirely new challenge: an older PGCE student, with 15 years teaching experience who had only just moved to the UK from Iran. Upon meeting him, I knew my mentor/mentee relationship would need to be entirely adjusted. Here was a man who had been teaching successfully for almost as long as I had, who came to me with a whole pedagogical toolkit ready to try out on his new British students, but who had little cultural knowledge of the UK system.
The DfE refer to teacher supply and retention as a “shared challenge”, noting in a 2018 report that international teachers could be a supportive stream in a challenging recruitment context. However, the same report notes that leaders recalled “negative experiences” and that they had “concerns… around the perceived effectiveness of international teacher recruits and their ability to adapt quickly to the demands of the English teaching context”.
This was the challenge I was about to face myself – how should I best induct my new mentee to the mysteries of the British schooling system?
Before our first meeting I assumed that our biggest challenge would be subject knowledge, particularly in Literature, as my mentee had been teaching English as an additional language in Iran. Quickly, I set to work preparing documents on the KS3 curriculum, writing out the GCSE topics for KS4, putting together revision guides and copies of the set texts. Concerned about the level of workload this would add, I started with only the absolute necessities for his first few weeks of teaching and decided we could build from there.
Luckily, he had an incredible work ethic and an ability to speed read that put me to shame. Subject knowledge would not be the issue I had envisioned.
What became clear was that we would need to develop an open and honest dialogue where we could discuss the dos and don’ts of British culture in the classroom. The CUREE framework for mentoring and coaching puts “establishing confidence in the relationship” and “asking good questions” at the heart of the mentor/mentee relationship. I decided to tackle our cultural differences from a place of curiosity and would often ask questions like, “How would this work in Iran?” or “How would your Iranian students have reacted to…?” This gave me a starting point to explain our British cultural quirks.
Surprisingly though, it was not my questioning that transformed our working relationship: it was his. My mentee had the most refreshingly forthright approach. When he saw or heard something he did not understand, he would ask me to explain it. I’m not easily offended so I did not interpret this as an attack on my teaching, my language choices or my pedagogy. Some of my less experienced colleagues found it quite abrasive at first, but soon recognised a thirst for knowledge. We pushed aside our reserved British sensibilities, where we would usually say nothing and smile politely, to embrace this fresh open dialogue.
A new element to our relationship became the “no stupid questions rule” and I told him to ask me anything and everything that he wanted to and that I would answer as honestly as I could. For example, he noticed early on that female colleagues would often use terms of endearment with students in informal contexts but noted that male colleagues did not do this and asked how he should address the students. We discussed how some of our students responded well to a more maternal and nurturing dialogue with female staff. I warned him that this would not be the case in every school and told him that it would be highly unusual for male staff to speak to students like this due to (rather outdated) gender stereotypes. It was an odd gender bias that I hadn’t considered before so I sent him to observe male colleagues to see how they addressed students. His conclusion? Instead of duck, male staff tended to use mate in an informal context – something I had never really noticed before!
His questions did not just extend to cultural anomalies, but to more challenging questions about the texts chosen our units and the evaluation of literary merit behind these. Why that text? Why that extract? What do we expect them to learn from it? Again, I would send him off to ask that to the colleague who wrote the unit or chose the texts to ensure a much more in depth understanding of the mechanisms behind their decisions. This practice led to a deeper insight into our curriculum journey and an oversight of how each lesson fits together. I will be adding this to my mentoring repertoire moving forward.
Writing in the TES, Matilda Martin notes that the DfE have reported a 300% increase in international teacher recruitment. As a British national, working within the system that I grew up in, there are so many tiny aspects of our school culture that we may not even consider in a mentoring dialogue. With a growing population of international student teachers, an adjustment to our assumptions and working practices is timely.
My favourite moment with my mentee, however, was more personal. He asked one morning in late November if I’d had a good weekend and I responded with a photo of my 3 year-old’s joyful expression as he saw our Christmas tree for the first time that year (yes, I do put up my Christmas tree in November!)
In Iran, they do not celebrate Christmas, but instead celebrate Yaldā Night. My mentee was fascinated at the concept of a Christmas tree and wanted to provide a similar experience for his 4 year-old. I found myself explaining the process of creating a Christmas tree like a recipe: fluff the branches, lights on first, then add tinsel, then baubles. He went home with a hastily written “recipe” and some shopping suggestions on a scrap of paper. A few weeks later, I got a photo of his “scroogy” efforts (his words not mine!) and his child’s delighted face.
For those of us who have been mentoring for a long time, I suggest it is probably time to rethink our understanding of what being a mentor constitutes, Christmas tree recipes and all!
Alice Marks amarks@oiea.co.uk
Alice Marks is a Deputy Head of English, in charge of Teaching and Learning at Ormiston Ilkeston Academy. Alice is a mentor for NIoE’sPGCE Secondary English course.
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