The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring

23Training Teachers in Academic Mentoring Practices: Empirical Foundations and a Case Example

Simon Larose and Stéphane Duchesne

Laval University, Québec City, Canada

Recent investigators of informal mentoring indicate that a good number of adolescents identify high school teachers as significant individuals in their social network, and that the presence and support of these teachers contributes to the quality of their social adjustment and school attachment (Black, Grenard, Sussman, & Rohrbach, 2010). In the light of these findings, many high schools have set up academic mentoring programs in which an experienced teacher is matched with one or more at‐risk students (Chan et al., 2013; Holt, Bry, & Johnson, 2008; Scott, 2017). Despite highly encouraging preliminary outcomes, however, inadequate teacher training and supervision as well as incomplete knowledge of the active mechanisms in mentoring have hindered such efforts.

Against this background, we conducted an ambitious five‐year intervention research project with the four following objectives: (a) train high school resource teachers (RTs)¹ in mentoring practices; (b) supervise their one‐on‐one mentoring with at‐risk students during the transition from elementary to high school; (c) identify the conditions for the effectiveness of this type of intervention; and (d) assess the short‐ and long‐term outcomes of the interventions on the teaching practices of the RTs and on the adjustment of their at‐risk mentees. From this project ...