Mentoring young teachers

Abstract

The year 2023 was declared a year of the teacher and mentor by a decree of Russia’s President. Mentoring is the most convenient and effective way to transfer knowledge and skills from experienced and knowledgeable teachers to the younger generation. Novice teachers need professional help in mastering pedagogical skills and various job duties of a teacher — be it those of a subject teacher, a homeroom teacher or a teacher involved in character education. It is necessary to create a situation of success in the work of a young teacher, promote the development of his or her personality on the basis of measuring the dynamics of his or her professional growth, and contribute to the formation of an individual teaching style of each teacher. The mentoring system aims to solve all these tasks. The study focuses on the specifics of mentoring of young teachers and job satisfaction among young teachers. The hypothesis was that the work with a mentor is positively associated with job satisfaction in young teachers. The study was conducted in general education schools of St Petersburg. The sample included 495 school directors and 781 young teachers. The following empirical methods were used in the study: Diagnostics of Job Satisfaction (by V.A. Rozanova) and a questionnaire for young teachers aimed at identifying the specifics of mentoring. The obtained data was processed and interpreted using methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, descriptive statistics, and Student’s t-test for independent samples. The Statistica v.5.5 software package was used for mathematical analysis of the data. Based on the results of the study, we can conclude that job satisfaction among young teachers having mentors is significantly higher than among young teachers without mentors. The survey showed that a entor’s didactic functions are the most important ones for young professionals, while functions that can be classified as social and psychological are of secondary importance. The only exception is the provision of psychological support to a young teacher — such support is reported by the respondents as one of the most important functions of a mentor.