New teachers’ perspectives of informal mentoring: quality of mentoring and contributors

Abstract

As an individual socialization initiative, informal mentoring has often been lauded as an effective tool to provide spontaneous and immediate social–emotional and career-related assistance to new teachers. Little is known about how informal mentoring is perpetuated in workplace. Through the conceptual lens of dynamic process theory of mentoring, we seek to illuminate the interactional patterns of informal mentoring as manifested through its contributors and quality. The findings of our study reveal that social interaction, time, organizational contexts, and individual characteristics mediate the process of informal mentoring. Further, informal mentoring is limited primarily to seeking information and is low in frequency of interaction and follow-up activities. Finally, we discuss a number of practical and theoretical implications related to informal mentoring, including the advantage of a hybrid model of mentoring and the addition of social interactions as a mediating factor of the dynamic process theory of mentoring.

Keywords:

• Informal mentoring
• early career teachers
• foreign language education
• in-service teacher education