Mentoring teacher-research: challenges and benefits according to Nepali mentors

This research paper looks at challenges and benefits in facilitating teacher-research expressed by nine mentors.

This small-scale research project sets out to systematically gather some in-depth qualitative data from a group of nine mentors with very recent experience of mentoring an average of ten secondary school teachers each on a nine-month-long (2019–20) British Council action research mentoring programme (ARMS-Nepal). 

While mentoring and teacher-research have separately generated a lot of literature, there have been very few studies which have put the two together and examined the specific skills and attributes which those aiming to facilitate teacher-research need to be aware of. This is what led the author, Richard Smith, to investigate the perceptions of a particular group of mentors he was working with over a nine-month period from June 2019 to February 2020, within the British Council Nepal’s ARMS programme.

We hope that the summary of findings will be useful for informing future training / mentoring within ARMS and other comparable programmes, as well as in individual cases outside these programmes.

This report was funded by the British Council's online community of practice for teacher educators.

The report is available in a pdf format below.

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