Being a Mentor to Trainee Computing Teachers
Mentoring reveals teaching as a deeply relational practice. These stories show how experienced teachers support trainee colleagues through modelling, dialogue, and shared problem-solving. In working through the uncertainties of classroom practice together, mentoring becomes a space where professional knowledge is not simply transmitted, but gradually formed through reflection and participation.
Jenny
I am a mentor this year, and my student recently told me how different it is from his first placement because we spend a lot of time teaching KS3 with physical computing. At first, he taught for 10 minutes, and then I stood up and did some bits and pieces, which worked well. It was funny when he joined us because I turned around and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I'm observing you,’ and I said, ‘No one sits in the back of my room with a clipboard; you can't do that. Come on; you get up, talk to the students, and ask them what they're doing’ And then, over time, I've done less and less to let him take over the class, but even now, I'm in the class to sit and watch and write up.
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He made me laugh because he said he didn't know how to phrase it initially. ‘But when I first arrived, key stage 3 was so loud, lots of them, and I thought I didn't want to do that. I didn't like it,’ and he continued, ‘Now it's my favourite part of the week. I love my key stage 3 classes; they're really good.’ He tells me it’s lovely to have more freedom in his teaching during those lessons on physical computing. It's good for trainee teachers to get a taste of different teaching methods when they learn and observe new approaches.
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My trainee volunteered to speak to Ofsted this morning because they did a teacher training inspection at his other placement school. He volunteered to talk to them because he said, ‘I want them to know that I have done physical computing, and how good it is for students to learn, and how difficult it is, but how supportive the school was and what a good experience it was.’ Some of that is because I know what I'm doing and guiding him in the right direction, but it just proves it can work, and you know, it's fun.
Pete
As a mentor, I devote a lot of time to joint lesson planning and doing things with trainees, and that is different from one of my placements when I was just given lesson plans to teach. I remember setting up a physical computing project for Sam, one of my mentees, when he was training. I wanted him to think through a scheme of work about his journey with the children and how that would start. I just said: ‘Here's a micro:bit. Play with it. What can you come up with?’
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Every year, I ask our trainees to do a slightly different project, and the rest of us in the department can observe these different experiences. We can see how they use the micro:bits and think about how we can adapt the activity for all of us to teach the curriculum.
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You think you’re aware of what the kids are doing all the time when you teach, but it’s interesting when you take that step back and observe a trainee’s lesson. I focus much more on students' interactions with physical computing than my classes and see what works more efficiently. Importantly, you see new ideas and think about ways to change things to make them work even better in the classroom.
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It was watching one of Katie's lessons with micro:bits that changed how we distribute and collect equipment. Now we have ‘kit packs’ that we give students at the beginning of the activity, and they save time that we used to lose to get things out and back in. And I observed common mistakes children would make or where they got stuck, so we took them away to make changes for the following lessons with more precise teacher explanations.
Jenny
Sometimes I observe my trainee, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, no, that didn't work. Well, I could try this’, and then he tries other things, but recently he got flustered. It was the first time he had something go wrong during a lesson with students using physical computing, and we were not team teaching.
So, sitting at the back of the classroom, I said, ‘It's okay, it's okay, these are nice students.’ And then one of the lads said, ‘Well, could I look at it, sir, and see if mine works?’ And they had a small crew at the front fixing this micro:bit buggy, which was lovely.
Bless him at the end of the lesson; he turned to me and said, ‘That must have been the worst lesson ever.’ I laughed and said, ‘No, it wasn't because you teach students that sometimes technology goes wrong for everyone, even a teacher. We have to go back over our steps and make sure they are correct and test things, and that's okay.’
This safe space is good for building teaching practice; everyone needs to learn.
Jenny
I am now mentoring a trainee who has never observed Key Stage 3 computing because his other placement school doesn’t teach it. With us, he’s led some programming lessons with Scratch and Python in Years 7 and 8 and the physical computing lessons with me using Lego and micro:bits.
At first, he found it harder to use physical computing in classes because when you're a trainee, you expect the room to be quiet, and my room is not silent, so he is adjusting and changing some lessons.
His other programming lessons are good but almost a different culture and teaching climate. He will soon have an observation.
So, which one would you like to be observed?
If I go into the Python one, the students will be seated, quiet, and do a little quiz, and I will see what they have done on their screens.
A robot sometimes falls off the ramp in physical computing lessons, and everyone laughs. It's a very different kind of classroom atmosphere, and I wouldn't say it's badly behaved, because students respect the fact that they have this expensive equipment and love being able to use it.