Primary and Secondary Program Webinar Series

The Mentoring for Effective Teaching (MET) webinar series 

The Mentoring for Effective Teaching (primary and secondary schools) webinar series is designed to provide information for teachers who supervise preservice teachers. While we refer to teachers who host preservice teachers as supervisors, their role is to support and guide development which means they take on the role of a mentor. Hence, this webinar series uses the term mentor teacher as it best describes the approach that is deemed most effective for preservice teacher development. 

The webinar series is underpinned by the Five Factor Model of Mentoring (Hudson, 2004) which was developed through research literature and substantiated by subsequent research. While the model was developed in Australia, it has been adopted nationally and internationally as a framework for university-school programs and for research related to mentoring. It is hoped that the model can be utilised as a reflective tool so supervising teachers can refine their mentoring skills to ensure all early career teachers are receiving consistent support to become confident and competent teachers. 

The five factors emerging from the research are Personal Attributes; System Requirements; Pedagogical Knowledge; Modelling; and finally, Feedback. Each of the factors has associated attributes and practices which are unpacked to support the enhancement of mentoring skills. Each webinar is short and designed to hold teacher’s interest. They can be viewed as separate clips or can be watched in their entirety. Some schools may decide to watch them as part of their team meetings with follow-up time left for discussion about how they may apply the practices to their own mentoring approaches. 

For those teachers who may be interested in pursuing further readings and research about mentoring, a list of some of the references has been noted for you below. 

Associated readings. 

Hudson, S., Hudson, P., James, S. M. & Hudson, E. (2023). Refining mentor teachers' feedback towards improving preservice teachers' practice. In Lynch, D., Yeigh, T. & Boyde, W. (Eds.), Re-Imagining Teaching Improvement: From Early Childhood to University (pp. 207–222). Springer. 

Kurti, E. N. (2023). Exploring the contribution of the five-factor mentoring model in advancing the pre-service teachers’ personal and professional growth. International Journal of Instruction, 16(1), 469-488. 

James, S. M., Hudson, S. & Lasczik, A. (2022). Primary preservice teachers' perspectives of their literacy mentoring experiences during professional placement. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 11(2), 195–212. 

Hudson, P, Hudson, S, Gray, B, Bloxham, R. (2013), Learning about being effective mentors: professional learning communities and mentoring, Procedia- Social and Behavioral Sciences, 93, 1291-1300 

Hudson, P, Hudson, S.(2011), Converting theory to practice: university-school collaboration on devising strategies for mentoring pedagogical knowledge, International Journal of Learning, 18(2), 321-329 

Hudson, P, Hudson, S. (2010), Mentor educators' understandings of mentoring preservice primary teachers, International Journal of Learning, 17(2), 157-170 

Hudson, P. (2005). From generic to specific mentoring: A five-factor model for developing primary teaching practices. In International Education Research Conference: Doing the Public Good: Positioning Education Research (pp. 1-10). Australian Association for Research in Education. 

Hudson*, P. (2004). Specific mentoring: A theory and model for developing primary science teaching practices. European journal of teacher education, 27(2), 139-146.