ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to highlight some mentoring strategies when working with beginning teachers who are at different developmental stages of teaching. It discusses the stages of development using Maynard and Furlong’s model of a beginning teacher’s development concerning basic teaching skills, teaching strategies and teaching styles. The chapter presents some characteristic behaviours of an effective teacher. It then provides a range of mentoring steps to support the beginning teacher’s journey of becoming an effective teacher, starting from early idealism then survival, recognising difficulties, hitting a plateau and finally to moving on stages of development. The chapter also focuses on how to support a beginning teacher to self-evaluate their lessons by using lesson debriefs and pupils’ feedback. A teaching strategy is the selection of appropriate basic teaching skills and pupil activities, such as explaining or questioning, managing classroom organisations and timings, to achieve the learning outcomes of a lesson.
