Building Identity through a Mentor
What a mentor relationship can do
- Significantly affects both mentor and mentee on professional identity and development
- Mentee can grow beyond the established baseline of competence
- Mentor moves beyond sharing into developing materials within a collaborative relationship
- Both can grow to new heights of professional growth
Five functions of mentoring
| Function | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Teaching | Teaching the daily practical skills of teaching |
| Sponsoring | Identifying mentee strengths; advising on activities; supporting attempts |
| Encouraging | Helping the mentee see the positive side and build on it |
| Counselling | Sound advice on practice, professional conduct, school and community culture |
| Befriending | Someone to whom the mentee can speak freely |
A teacher who finds a good mentor early in their career develops differently from one who does not. The effect is not subtle. A strong mentor relationship shapes how the mentee thinks, what they pay attention to, what kind of teacher they become.
The relationship is also not one-sided. Mentors grow through mentoring. The collaboration is genuinely two-way.
What a mentor relationship can produce
Finding a mentor in your workplace can have a significant effect on both the mentor and the mentee with regard to professional identity and development. Two specific effects are worth highlighting.
The mentee grows beyond the baseline
Under a formal mentoring process, the mentee not only reaches the competency level of the mentor; they grow beyond the established baseline along with the mentor. The relationship is not about the mentee catching up. It is about both moving forward.
This is one of the more counter-intuitive features of good mentoring. The mentee can reach further than the mentor’s starting point because the relationship itself produces growth.
The mentor develops new materials and approaches
A good mentor does more than share what they already have. They share materials but also go beyond sharing into the development of materials within a collaborative relationship.
This requires reflective practice and collaborative planning, coupled with a joint action plan by mentor and mentee. The mentor cannot stay still during the mentoring; the relationship pushes them to develop.
Through this process, both mentor and mentee, who is in this case the reflective practitioner, can grow to new heights of professional competence.
A mentor who treats mentoring as a one-way transfer of expertise misses this dynamic. A mentor who treats it as a collaboration produces stronger development for both parties.
The five functions of mentoring
A mentor does not do one thing. Five distinct functions sit inside the role. Each one matters at different times for the mentee.
Function 1: teaching
The first function is teaching the skills that teachers practise on a daily basis. This is the most concrete function. The mentor shows the mentee how things are done, talks them through specific situations, and helps them build the practical skill set.
Teaching as a mentoring function is more than transmission of technique. It includes context, judgement, and the small adjustments that experienced teachers make without thinking. These small adjustments are often the hardest to teach because the mentor may not be aware of them. A reflective mentor works to make the tacit visible.
Function 2: sponsoring
Sponsoring is the function of identifying the mentee’s strengths and advising on what activities will be most successful. The sponsor sees what the mentee may not see in themselves and points it out.
Sponsoring then requires the mentor to support the mentee when they attempt new practice. Identifying a strength without supporting attempts to use it is incomplete. The mentor stays present while the mentee tests new ground.
A teacher who has been sponsored well takes on activities they would not have attempted on their own. A teacher who has not been sponsored often stays within a narrower range of activity than their actual ability would support.
Function 3: encouraging
Encouraging is a key mentor function. By helping the mentee see the positive side of their teaching practice and building on those reflections, the mentor supports and encourages growth.
This is not flattery. Genuine encouragement names what is actually working and helps the mentee notice it. Many teachers, especially early in their career, see only what is going wrong. A mentor who can name what is going right is doing essential work.
The encouragement also builds the kind of professional confidence that makes risk-taking possible. A teacher who feels seen as competent by an experienced colleague is more willing to try things that stretch them.
Function 4: counselling
Counselling is the fourth function. The mentee needs sound advice regarding teaching practice, professional conduct, and the culture of the school and community.
Counselling is broader than teaching. It covers things that are not strictly about technique: how to handle a difficult relationship with a colleague, how to manage parent expectations, how to read the unwritten rules of the school. These are professional skills that no training program covers in detail.
A mentor who counsels well often shortens the new teacher’s adjustment to the institution by a year or more.
Function 5: befriending
The fifth function is befriending. The mentee needs someone to whom they can speak freely.
Befriending is not the same as friendship in the social sense. It is a professional relationship in which the mentee can voice doubts, frustrations, and uncertainties without fear of judgement or consequence.
This function matters because the other four cannot work fully without it. A mentee who is too guarded to reveal what they are struggling with cannot be taught, sponsored, encouraged, or counselled effectively. The befriending function creates the conditions in which the other four can operate.
Befriending requires trust. Trust takes time to build and can be damaged quickly. A mentor who breaks confidence loses the befriending function and, with it, much of the rest of the mentoring relationship.
How the five functions work together
The five functions are not separate activities to be scheduled. They flow into each other in any given mentoring conversation.
A single conversation might start with the mentee speaking freely about a difficult lesson (befriending), move into specific advice on what to try next time (teaching), shift into a discussion of the mentee’s underlying strengths the mentor noticed (sponsoring), include a recognition of what the mentee did well (encouraging), and end with broader advice on how this fits the school’s culture (counselling).
A skilled mentor moves between these functions naturally. A less skilled mentor often gets stuck in one function, usually teaching, and never gets to the others.
The mentee can also help shape the mentoring. Asking different kinds of questions activates different functions. A question like “what did I do well today?” invites encouragement. A question like “how have you handled a parent like this?” invites counselling. A question like “I am wondering whether I am cut out for this work” invites befriending.
How to seek a mentor
For a teacher seeking a mentor, several things help.
Look for someone who models reflective practice
The best mentors are themselves reflective practitioners. Their own teaching is a model worth observing. Their own thinking about teaching is a model worth listening to.
A senior teacher who is experienced but not reflective may make a poor mentor. The mentee absorbs what the mentor models, and an unreflective model produces an unreflective mentee.
Look for someone who can move between the five functions
A mentor who is strong in one function but weak in others provides only partial support. The mentee may need to combine mentors, getting different functions from different colleagues, but a single mentor who covers most of the functions is the strongest arrangement.
Look for someone who is in a position to invest
Mentoring takes time. A mentor who is themselves overloaded cannot invest the time the relationship needs. Better to find a less prominent mentor with capacity than a prominent mentor with no time.
Build the relationship gradually
A formal mentoring relationship can be set up by the school. A useful informal relationship grows over time through regular conversation and small acts of trust.
A teacher who initiates short, low-stakes professional conversations with several experienced colleagues over a year often discovers which one becomes a real mentor. The relationship reveals itself rather than being declared.
Teaching, sponsoring, encouraging, counselling, befriending.
Teaching covers daily practical skills. Sponsoring identifies and supports strengths. Encouraging helps the mentee see what is working. Counselling gives advice on professional conduct and school culture. Befriending creates a space where the mentee can speak freely. Without befriending, the other four cannot operate fully because the mentee cannot be honest about what they need.
What this means for the reflective practitioner
A reflective teacher uses mentoring as one of the main supports for their development. This includes both being mentored and, eventually, mentoring others.
Two practical points hold across the relationship.
- The relationship needs to be deliberate. Mentoring that drifts loses its effect. A regular meeting time, a clear sense of what the mentee is working on, and an honest conversation about how the relationship is going all help.
- The relationship is two-way. The mentee contributes to the mentor’s development as well as the other way around. Both parties grow if the relationship is good.
A reflective practitioner who can name which mentoring function they need at a given moment, and ask for it directly, makes the most of the mentor relationship.