Chapter 1: Introduction: The Complexities of Identifying Mentoring Best Practices

In 2010, the authors of this book joined a group of other mentoring scholars at the American Educational Research Association Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a newly-formed consortium named The Global Mentoring Research Network. Organizers of the group, Dr. Frances Kochan and Dr. Philip Feldman, stated that the initial purpose of this network was to create a repository for research articles on mentoring, because “there did not appear to be a high quality, cohesive, easily accessible body of research available focused on the primary issues of mentoring theory and practice in education” (Kochan, 2013, p. 1). Members of the network identified five broad topic areas under which mentoring research could be organized: foundations of mentoring, best practices in mentoring, culture and mentoring, policies/politics in mentoring, and technology and mentoring. Although the creation of the central repository for mentoring research articles is still an ongoing challenge, Dr. Kochan has extended the work of the Global Mentoring Research Network by creating this book series, Perspectives in Mentoring, to highlight research around important issues in mentoring in education. In addition, she edited a special issue of the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (2013, Volume 2, Issue 3), in which leaders of the network topic groups published overviews of their mentoring topics and outlined potential research agendas in those topics. We published our article, “Best Practices in Mentoring: Challenges and Possibilities,” in that special issue, to outline the breadth of the field of mentoring in education and the complexity of defining the term “best practices.” We also suggested how researchers might begin to engage in identifying mentoring best practices across educational contexts.