Our Experience of Mentorship

When Prerna and I started designing mentorship as an intervention, we often wondered why we felt so confident that it could bring real shifts. The more we talked, the clearer the answer became: we bet on mentorship because we have lived it.

One of the most significant benefits we have received at Simple Education Foundation is mentorship - not just by direct managers who gave us advice, but by a culture where people genuinely cared about each other's growth. Our managers and peers create an environment of trust and psychological safety, where it feels okay to ask questions, make mistakes, and learn. 

An environment like this gives direction, shapes our values, and makes us more caring, empathetic, and collaborative human beings. This experience is one that everyone deserves. Especially young and aspiring teachers, who are about to embark on a long and often difficult journey of growing as educators. 

While countless recommendations and the NEP make mentorship a crucial part of the teacher education curriculum, yet mentorship in pre-service education is laced with issues. It often stays within the boundaries of academic support, rarely reaching who someone is, the challenges they carry, or the identity they are still becoming. So we set out to understand what is holding back pre-service trainees from receiving a meaningful mentorship experience. 

What Research Tells Us About Mentorship?

According to the research done by Allen & Peach in 2007 and Zeichner in 2010, in pre-service teacher education, mentoring during practicum is meant to connect theory to the messy reality of the classroom, with mentors guiding mentees' professional growth.

But in practice, it often falls short. 

Global research highlights that mentoring tends to be short-lived and fragmented, squeezed into practicum windows that leave little room for real relationship-building or ongoing dialogue (Ambrosetti & Dekkers, 2010). 

It also tends to be hierarchical and evaluative — mentors assessing rather than accompanying — leaving little space for pre-service teachers to sit with their uncertainties or explore who they are becoming as educators (Achinstein & Davis, 2014; Aspfors & Fransson, 2015). 

For mentoring to be truly developmental, it needs to be sustained, relational, and safe enough for both skill and identity to grow. Mentoring needs to be a meaningful learning experience with the space to pause, be curious, navigate uncertainty, and truly develop by being challenged and supported. 

What we saw on the ground 

We spent months observing pre-service trainees during their School Experience Programme, a 40-day internship where pre-service trainees step into real classrooms for the first time.

Along with them, we walked into classrooms across different institutions, and one thing kept staring back at us: There was no one to mentor and support them. Every teacher was occupied. The trainees felt clueless. There was minimum feedback on their teaching practices, less support and no regular observation.

This was the moment when we realised the problem is bigger than we thought. 

Why are the Challenges There?

We asked ourselves why is this happening? 

The  answer we figured was that school teachers are overworked with the responsibility of the whole classroom, endless administrative work, and a lot more. Teachers didn't have enough time to sit with a trainee to guide them.

While experienced teachers are often expected to mentor novice teachers and trainees, mentoring is a distinct professional competency. Research consistently shows that effective mentors require preparation in coaching, observation, feedback, and adult learning, which often our teachers are unprepared for. 

Additionally, many pre-service trainees don’t get the opportunity to pause and learn during these internships, as they end up taking the class and administrative load due to teacher shortages. 

Another important part of mentoring is psychological safety. Each trainee deserves the opportunity to question, with safety and depth, yet very often, this is missing in spaces, which dampens the curiosity and authenticity with which trainees show up. 

What Mentorship CAN Look Like? 

Over the past few months, we conducted focus group discussions to understand what trainees need from mentorship. Trainees craved support in the moment, not a month later. And they wanted less theory and more practical - activity-based learning: role-plays, demonstrations, and real classroom scenarios. Their teacher identities being built, were fragile, and they needed more confidence to put weight behind their own actions.  

What surprised us the most was that in the moment of need and to build their own confidence, trainees turned to a specific support system, that of peers— a system happening quietly, informally, and working.

Thus, we decided to strengthen a system organically built, and formalise it to refine mentorship experience. We saw the same key principles in action, that we felt in our experience at SEF, that of feeling connected, safe and consistently supported. 

Our Solution and the shift needed.

We chose peer mentorship deliberately. Trainees consistently spoke about the value of peer support during difficult classroom situations, moments of self-doubt, and experiences that felt hard to navigate alone.

A peer who has recently walked the same road feels relatable and non-hierarchical, which makes the space feel safe. It is sustainable — as it draws on people already inside the institutes rather than adding scarce external mentors — and institutions saw it as a way to build leadership in both Year 1 and Year 2 trainees. 

So we decided to start Mentor Pods, an intervention designed around what trainees actually need. The mentorship focuses on:

1. Psychological safety — the prerequisite for any meaningful mentorship. Trainees shut down when they feel evaluated, pressured, or dismissed, so mentorship must be clearly distinct from assessment.

   
   

2. Peer support — already happening informally and highly valued, especially during the school experience programme.

   
   

3. Real-time, in-context support — help navigating challenges as they unfold, not a debrief a month later.

   
   

4. Practical, activity-based learning — demonstrations, role-plays, and real classroom scenarios anchoring every session, over theory.

   
   

5. Teacher identity — a space to witness and anchor an identity that is still forming, since many trainees entered reluctantly and found meaning through their students.

   
   

If mentorship is to matter, it has to shift from being evaluative, academic, and one-off to being safe, relational, peer-driven, and available in the moment. That is what we have set out to build. And this is just the beginning. Over the next few months, we'll follow Mentor Pods as a system in motion, sharing what we learn, the stories that emerge, and the impact we see.