How did the teachers benefit from the mentoring relationship?
The teachers believed that research mentoring led to tangible and long-term benefits both for their personal development and their professional development as teachers. The benefits they listed included: • becoming reflective practitioners about teaching and learning in their own classrooms • reflecting on, and responding to, challenge to their personal and professional practice • re-evaluating the nature of mentoring • appreciating the benefits of collaborative research mentoring to aid individual action research. One of the teachers’ main discoveries was that mentoring is a two-way learning process. They came to regard the whole mentoring process as a learning tool for the mentor too. They learned to value and use feedback where the manner of delivery of feedback was more important than the content. In addition, mentoring involved not only professional development for both the mentor and the mentee, but also offered a wealth of opportunity for personal development, as both teachers l
