The Future of Education

The Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) was first created in 2009 for the professional development of practicum mentors in pre-service Teacher Education. The MPI was updated in 2019 and is currently available free, online and in eight languages (www.mentoringprofile.com).  The MPI is a 62-item instrument that provides mentors with feedback on the ways in which mentors conceptualize their practice [1]. This feedback is rendered as a set of motivator and challenge scales. These scales are then converted into three summary charts and a mentoring profile grid.  The scales, charts, and grid (collectively called a Mentoring Profile) provide mentors with a window into their mentoring practice. Individual Mentoring Profiles are a useful prompt for mentors who wish to make explicit and available for critical reflection the assumptions that underlie their mentoring practice.  Aggregate Mentoring Profiles—a summary profile for a group of mentors from a particular jurisdiction—are useful for determining mentoring norms that exist within and/or across contexts. The significance of Aggregate MPI Profiles is that they allow the MPI to be used as a metric for cross-context comparative analyses of cohorts of practicum mentors (e.g., across a region, a country, or the world). To date, over 3000 mentors throughout the world have completed the MPI. Research findings from within-context and across-context studies will be shared as an illustration of the MPI’s potential as a professional development prompt and a research tool in pre-service teacher education [2].

Keywords: Mentoring, Supervision, Teacher Education, the Practicum.

References:
[1] Clarke, A., Collins, J., Triggs, V., & Neilsen, W. (2012). The mentoring profile inventory: An online professional development resource for cooperating teachers. Teaching Education. 23(2), 167-194.
[2] Clarke, A. & Mena, J. (forthcoming).  An international study of practicum mentors: Learning about ourselves by learning about others. Teaching and Teacher Education.