ABSTRACT
School mentors play a key role in beginning teachers’ professional development; they model high-quality teaching and professionalism, induct new members into learning communities, and enable innovation and creativity. More importantly, they observe, feed back, question, listen and initiate dialogue with beginning teachers in order to set appropriate developmental targets, and broaden the focus of reflective practice beyond singular lessons, all of which promote self-efficacy. With heavy workloads, mentors are not always aware of the gamut of research-informed strategies which can be utilised in mentor meetings to progress geographical thinking, reflection and action. This chapter starts by considering some of the qualities effective mentors bring to formal mentor-mentee meetings and why these are key to successful teacher growth and development. It then sets out a number of strategies and frameworks such as reflective practice, teacher noticing, dialogic talk and learning conversations through geographical enquiry which can be used to support beginning teachers in their professional development as geography teachers. Central to any mentoring strategy is the subject and for this reason the chapter also provides some practical examples from the geography classroom which focus on the question Roberts (2010, p. 112) would put at the heart of everything – ‘Where’s the geography?’
