Values & the mentor/ student teacher relationship
Alison Hardy is a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn
The mentor-mentee relationship is key to student teachers’ progress whilst on placement but sometimes it breaks down. This can be disastrous for both, occasionally leading to the student moving schools or (very rarely) leaving the course altogether. In a small study with 4 student teachers, Danyluk and othersrecently identified four reasons for this breakdown: subject knowledge, poor planning and sidestepping difficult conversations. They also suggest that personality clashes may cause the relationship to fail.
When students and mentors fail to get on we could use the catch-all phrase ‘personality clash’, but this clash might be caused by differences that are philosophical and ideological in nature. In other words, mentors and mentees might not agree because of deeply held but unspoken and contrasting beliefs, values and attitudes.
To discuss the myriad of beliefs, values and attitudes that we hold is beyond this blogpost, so I am only going to focus on one small aspect: the values we have of D&T and education.
I think the values we attribute to D&T affect how how we teachand why we think it should be taught in schools. D&T is one school subject within a whole curriculum, a curriculum that is bound together to meet published educational aims (like become educated citizens in the English National Curriculum); but each of us has our own beliefs about education and what it is for. Some may think its about learning skills for a job or to use in life, how to behave in society and it is most primitive – to read and write.
Whatever your beliefs, these will affect what you value in D&T as well as what and how you teach it.
So, if you think education is about preparing young people for the world of work you might focus on teaching and talking about D&T jobs, likefashion or product design or engineering or electronics; if you think it’s about how technology and understanding how technology affects the environment, your lessons might focus more on product life cycle. Now, it’s more likely that you have a hierarchy of values about D&T and so prioritise one aspect more than another (making over designing, sketching over CAD). What ever your values are, they will probably be different from others in D&T (& outside D&T).
There are several explanations as to why we differ, here are 2 of them: your D&T experiences in school and your age. These are interconnected because what you experienced at school is dependent (in part) on your age because curriculum changes over time. (Mike Martin has written about 5 eras of D&T which explain how the curriculum has evolved or listen to my 4 podcasts about the history of D&T.)
To help mentors explore the differences between them and their student teachers’ values I presented five different reasons for why D&T is taught in Suzanne Lawson and Sue Wood-Griffith’s book Mentoring Design and Technology Teachers in the Secondary School. These were:
- D&T meets our economic and domestic needs
- Generic and transferrable skills
- Technological awareness
- Create and recognise good design
- Personal development and enjoyment
It’s worth mentors and their student teachers using these 5 themes to explore their values and compare them. Use these questions to start the conversation:
- Which theme do you most closely associate with?
- How do your values influence your lessons and what you teach?
Relationships often benefit from conversations shared values and beliefs. Mentors and students listening to each other talk about why they teach D&T, exploring similarities and differences, may go some way to reducing the risk of conflict and disagreement between them.
Further reading
If you struggle with difficult conversations this book gives good advice: Patten, B., Stone, S. & Heen, S. (2011). Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. London: Penguin – there is summary at https://www.getstoryshots.com/books/difficult-conversations-summary/
References
Martin, M. (2013). Five Eras of Making and Designing. In: PATT27 Technology Education for the Future: A Play on Sustainability, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2-6 December 2013. pp. 318-324.Danyluk, P.J., Burns, A., Crawford, K. & Laurie Hill. S.L. (2020). Preservice teachers’ perspectives of failure during a practicum, Teaching Education, DOI: 10.1080/10476210.2019.1693536
