School-based mentors and judgementoring

Talking to my school-based mentors about the dangers of judgementoring (Hobson and Malderez, 2013), I notice a similar initial resistance to the one I had when talking to Malderez about SIRP for the fist time, before experiencing SIRP first hand. They say:

• “But why wouldn’t I praise the students when praise is due?”
• “But the students expect my feedback, they actively seek it after the lesson!”
• “How can they learn if I don’t make them aware of their mistakes?”.

My response to this is inspired by Dewey’s (1974) conviction that all learning is very personal; we learn that which we experience as being sufficiently personally relevant to us, i.e. worthy of being learnt:

[The student] has to see on his own behalf and in his own way the relations between means and methods employed and results achieved. Nobody else can see for him, and he can’t see just by being ‘told’, although the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see (151).

As Malderez likes to say in our mentoring discussions: if there is a need to learn, learning will take care of itself. So, instead of praising the student potentially into complacency, or spotting ‘mistakes’ for them at the risk of blocking their learning and/or undermining our relationships, why not help them arrive at the answers of their questions by themselves? An alternative response to a student expecting judgementoring from their mentor might therefore be something along the lines of:

On the basis of how your students responded to your teaching in lesson X, is there anything praiseworthy or in need of improvement? Let’s use SIRP to clarify your thinking.

By helping student teachers develop a habit of autonomously making sense of what happens in their teaching practice, we do them a service in the short run (it’s a gratifying experience), but also in the long run: by feeling they don’t need to depend on external sources to make up their own minds and by making proactivity their ‘default mode’ they develop agency, which is at the core of being professional.

References:

1. Dewey, J. (1974). John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2. Hobson, A. & Malderez, A. (2013). Judgementoring and other threats to realizing the potential of school-based mentoring in teacher education. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2(2), 89-108.