Exploring narratives through mentoring

As teachers our stories change throughout our working lives. They are shaped by our experiences, our learning, our contexts, our relationships within school communities and our and roles.

As mentors and coaches when we support others to develop and learn we are inevitably interacting with their stories. We can choose to do this actively and we can find ourselves doing this responsively, or we may choose to deliberately overlook and block them.  But storytelling is one of the most natural ways that individuals and communities learn and make sense of learning and so we might as well draw on this phenomenon in our roles as educators.

When working with coaches and mentors I have occasionally drawn upon a conversational structure that I first experienced in a research methods training workshop, called the ‘narrative interview’. In a workshop for Northern Rocks which I am co-hosting with Haili Hughes we will be exploring ‘mentoring as a radical act’. One of the workshop features will be a modelling of and discussion related to the use of the narrative interview structure as a way of supporting this mentoring stance.

The narrative approach is a way of creating space for reflection, encouraging active listening and enabling expansive and relevant conversation between the mentor and the mentee.

Imagine while you read this a mentoring conversation between Alima a student teacher and Tom her mentor.

The narrative structure has three parts as follows:

Main narration

Having agreed a general focus for the conversation Tom asks Alima ‘tell me about your experience of…’. For example, Tom might invite Alima to ‘tell me about your experience of planning and teaching a topic you found challenging’ or ‘tell me about your experience of working with a teaching assistant’. As Alima reflects on the question Tom does not interrupt her. Alima may pause to think, she may describe a specific situation or a more general one, but over time she is sharing a narrative that is unique to her. Tom offers non-verbal encouragement to help Alima feel confident to continue telling the story of that experience.

Questioning

Tom asks Alima considered and relevant questions. These are limited to questions which encourage Alima to extend or deepen her account e.g. What happened then? How did that feel? Was this a one-off or is this typical? Tom does not offer opinions, judgements or ask questions to trigger an argument or contradiction.

Small talk

Alima and Tom engage in more informal conversation around the issues raised, which is not characterised by mentor/mentee role-taking. In the case of working with a teaching assistant, for example, they might talk through some of the affordances and challenges of professional relationships in the classroom, or the value of learning from other adults who know a particular child well through their work with them over time, or the ways that a teacher can develop inclusive practices.

This narrative model of a mentoring conversation itself could be a radical act. It challenges mentors to think differently about how they can engage a student teacher, how they can support them to reflective, and how they can help them to make sense of the contexts in which they are learning to teach. The small talk can create space in which the mentor gains new insights from the mentee. This phase often taps into the values that drive our work. The personalisation of the conversation reminds the mentor that student teachers are diverse and unique.

Narratives create opportunities to explore contexts, cultures and changes over time. They are inhabited by people and the relationships between them, their motivations and emotions. They also provide a space in which dilemmas can be described and explored, where events are reflected upon and from which decisions can emerge. The best stories are the ones that leave you wanting sequels. What could be a better destination for a mentoring conversation?