Signature Strengths as a Gateway to Mentoring: Facilitating Emergent Teachers’ Transition into Language Teaching

Abstract

Emergent teachers, and in particular language teachers, undergo an evolution of their personal and professional identities over time, one that taps into key processes in teacher psychology (cf. Li & De Costa, this volume; Sahakyan et al., this volume). Developing new roles, different perspectives, engaging in new behaviours, and shifts in attitudes within the classrooms where they may once have thrived as students highlight a few of the changes encountered by emergent teachers (Kanno & Stuart, 2011). As a result of the shaping of their nascent professional identities, emergent teachers may experience considerable tension and self-doubt, especially if the personal and professional dimensions of becoming a teacher are not well balanced (Beijaard et al., 2004). Among the tensions experienced by teachers are wanting to care for students but being expected to be tough, balancing work and private life, feeling incompetent but feeling compelled to be an expert, maintaining emotional distance, harmonising teaching with other work-related tasks, depending on a mentor yet wanting to go it alone, respecting students’ integrity, shifting from being a student to being a teacher, dealing with contradictory institutional attitudes, and wanting to take on more responsibility. Personality theorist Karen Horney described the ‘tyranny of the shoulds’, which reflects a neurotic need to be perfect, to meet impossibly conflicting standards (e.g. enjoy life but to be above personal pleasure), to be fully in of their apparent shortcomings, emergent teachers can feel that they are not being taken seriously, can feel fed up and as if they are being pushed (Pillen et al., 2013). Numerous studies have reported that as many as half of new teachers abandon their careers in their first five years (Jonson, 2002; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). Multiple reasons have been proposed for this mass exodus, including a dearth of supportive mentoring. Emergent teachers who remain in the profession have most likely had some help in facing the many challenges inherent in the process of gaining their initial experience (Asención Delaney, 2012).