Chapter 5: Face-To-Face, Online, and Hybrid Mentoring in a Professional Development Program

Teachers are a critical component to successful educational reform, but in order for them to help transform schools, teachers “need to be offered expanded and enriched professional development experiences that should be tied directly to the emerging student performance standards and be continuous, site-based, job-embedded, teacher designed, and organizationally focused” (Dilworth & Imig, 1995, p. 5). Effective professional development that leads to change helps teachers develop content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and skills they need to succeed in their classroom as well as build or strengthen their learning community (Loucks-Horsley, Stiles, & Hewson, 1996; Vrasidas & Zembylas, 2004).

However, too often professional development consists of one-time learning opportunities with limited impact on teaching and learning (Loucks-Horsley et al., 1996). After a short period of time in face-to-face professional development, teachers are left on their own in terms of determining when and how to implement these new ideas from professional development (Collins & Clark, 2008; Opfer & Pedder, 2011). High quality professional development programs, in contrast, are designed to provide ongoing support that includes mentoring. Mentoring, as a supportive mechanism, has been used to assist preservice and in-service teachers to gain content knowledge and pedagogical skills (Gutke & Albion, 2008; Schneider, 2008). The inclusion of mentors, or “experienced teachers with more content knowledge or experience in using a particular program or teaching practice” (Loucks-Horsley, Love, Stiles, Mundry, & Hewson, 2003, p. 219), is becoming increasingly common in teacher professional development programs. Successful professional development for K–12 teachers relies on high quality mentoring programs.