What is the difference between Coaching, Mentoring, and Self-Mentoring?

National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) , National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) , AASA, The School Superintendents Association

In May 2017, Marsha Carr, myself, and Kelly Flynn wrote an article titled "Using Mentoring, Coaching, and Self-Mentoring to Support Public School Educators," located at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098655.2017.1316624 to help educational leaders support new teachers with the concepts of coaching, mentoring and especially self-mentoring. Seven years later, I still see and hear educators struggling with these concepts and roles and how to best implement them within their schools and districts. To us, coaching, mentoring, and self-mentoring are three distinct actions that, while interconnected, have a different role and purpose in implementation. To that, I would add the concepts of self-leadership to create a complete package for new and veteran educators at all levels.

Conceptually, coaching is a short-term (or shorter-term) relationship focused on performance improvement through explicit instruction, feedback, and in-the-moment guidance and support. Typically, coaching involves a coaching model or framework and relies heavily on effective communication, modeling, and reflection.

Mentoring is a long-term relationship often utilized to help new employees assimilate into a new environment or profession. The intent of mentoring is for a new employee to learn and grow from a more experienced employee who can serve as an advisor, guide, role model, support, and advocate for the new employee, helping them to become a successful member of the organization, and inducted positively into the organizational culture and system. Mentoring relies heavily upon the relationship between the mentor and mentee and is built on trust and open communication between the two. Mentoring often falters due to the mismatch between mentor and mentee, the lack of training of mentors in how to mentor, and the lack of skills of the mentor (poor communication, time management, lack of patience, etc.).

Self-mentoring is a framework and resource for educators to use alone or in conjunction with mentoring and coaching (as a layering effect) to guide and support their self-development. It is particularly effective in situations where educators feel or are isolated from coaching and mentoring support and programs (it is particularly useful in rural education contexts). Self-mentoring (which is grounded in self-leadership) is a four-step or tiered process that begins with self-awareness, followed by self-development and self-reflection, and ends with self-monitoring. In this four-step process, an educator becomes aware of an area in need of improvement, they take on the task of learning about this area and implementing an action plan for improvement, they gather data to guide and support their self-reflection, and set up metrics to support future monitoring of their implementation of the area that they have improved. A great way to think about self-mentoring is self-guided professional development and action research for professional growth.

The ideas of self-leadership (Manz and Neck, 2004; Neck and Houghton, 2006) not only support educators as they are going through coaching and mentoring but are also key to working through the steps of self-mentoring as self-leadership (the ability to lead one's self) is the highest form of leadership. Self-leadership has three areas: personal behaviors, natural rewards, and constructive thought patterns. The goal of personal behaviors is to engage in self-reflection about our behaviors as educators and then take action to decrease the negative ones and increase the positive ones. The focus of natural rewards is to determine what motivates us as individuals and place those rewards strategically in spots along the way as we work to complete tasks and the work of coaching, mentoring, and self-mentoring to increase our motivation and energy. Finally, the intent of constructive thought patterns is to tune out the negative voices we all have and tune into the positive voices we often ignore or don't pay enough attention to.

Finally, coaching, mentoring, self-mentoring, and self-leadership are interconnected as illustrated in the Figure below.

So, as we think about the implementation of coaching, mentoring, self-mentoring, and self-leadership, I believe it is highly appropriate for pre-service teachers/educators to not only learn about coaching and mentoring and what to expect in the process but to also learn about self-mentoring and how to implement this vital resource and tool for professional growth and lifelong learning as well as to learn the ideas and concepts of self-leadership as part of teacher and educator leadership.

So my questions to you are: 1) how do you see the roles and relationships between coaching and mentoring, 2) what are your thoughts about self-mentoring and self-leadership, and 3) if you could design and implement the ideal mentoring program for new teachers and new administrators - how would you go about it, what would the outcomes be, and why would you design it the way you did?

Yours in education,

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