Using Self-Mentoring to Increase Teacher Efficacy and Confidence as Leaders

Abstract

Self-mentoring, the act of leading oneself in an unknown environment, is a sustainable practice of leadership with developing teacher leaders. One manner in which self-mentoring contributes to the development of a teacher leader is through increased confidence and self-efficacy (Bond & Hargreaves, 2014). When the self-efficacy of a classroom teacher increases, the efficacy of the students also increases (Bandura 1997), promoting higher levels of achievement. Public school teachers involved in self-mentoring studies harvested benefits of self-mentoring in their role as a classroom leader through augmented student engagement and motivation, but analogously in school-wide leadership roles. This chapter will elucidate how to use self-mentoring to increase confidence and teacher efficacy as leaders. It begins with an overview of self-mentoring inclusive of theory and the results yielded from several research studies; self-efficacy and confidence as it relates to teacher leadership; and how self-mentoring supports the development of teacher leaders and organizational citizenship.