A Reflection on a Mentoring Session with a Novice Japanese High School Teacher

This paper describes a one-on-one mentoring session conducted with a colleague in a public secondary school in Japan. The main purposes of this mentoring session are: (1) to help a novice teacher be more aware of herself as a teacher, and (2) to deepen mutual understanding between a novice teacher and a mentor (me) by utilizing some advising strategies. The influence of advising strategies on the dialogue between the mentee and the mentor is analyzed through three extracts from the mentoring session. Then I present my self-reflection on how the mentoring session affects me as a mentor. Since conducting mentoring sessions intentionally using specific strategies is uncommon among Japanese secondary school teachers, I hope this paper can help new advisors, mentors, or teachers, especially those supervising novice teachers and engaging in in-service teacher education in secondary schools.