Supermentoring

Purpose/research question

The aim of supermentoring is to give teachers comprehensive, structured feedback and not least feedforward on their teaching. Supervision in the conventional sense has a strong element of control/personality, and traditional mentoring is both long-term and costly. Supermentoring brings together the best of two worlds, and has proved effective.

The CTL has developed a special procedure that considers a wealth of elements from practical teaching, and which can be used by anyone who wants to help colleagues develop their teaching practice.

Background

On the teacher training programme for  assistant professors, the participants often have difficulties translating the knowledge acquired during the programme into practice – despite the fact that the teacher training programme for assistant professors is planned with very clear focus on practical teaching.

Also, the 'teacher-efficacy' of new teachers is often not very high, i.e. the teachers' confidence in their ability to promote student learning.
Many years of practice has shown that many assistant professors generally benefit from mentoring by an experienced colleague. However, the ideal, long-term mentoring is time-consuming and thus costly.

Supervision as such, which is short-term and very selective, includes a large element of assessment, which in itself is not a problem, but on the other hand it is not what most people feel they need when embarking on their career as university teachers.

'Supermentoring' is a combination of the two concepts: formative, i.e. a stepping stone for the assistant professor to reflect on his or her practice and develop professionally and in the short term – while referring to the areas that are included in the teacher training programme for assistant professors. There is considerable evidence to suggest that such intervention has an immediate (and positive) effect, but only at the anecdotal level; and it is not known whether a general improvement of the assistant professors' 'teacher-efficacy' and practice is achieved in the long term.

Status: current

We are making an online-ressource for both educational developers og lecturers who wish to work with supermentoring.