Listening, Play, and Social Attraction in the Mentoring of New Teachers

Source: Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, Volume 18, Iss. 3, 2010, p. 215 - 231.

The current study investigates the roles of mentors and proteges as they manage dialectical tensions in a professional environment.

Sixty-two first-year teachers in a county school district in the southeastern USA participated in the study.
The participants answered a questionnaire about their mentors' empathic and directive listening, playful communication, social attractiveness, and ability to help them manage dialectical tensions of socialization.

Regression analyses revealed that both empathic and directive listening helped the protege relieve these tensions. While playful communication did not directly explain relieving protege's tensions, it did predict social attraction.

These findings support cognitive reappraisal and Rogerian models of helping, underscore the importance of listening to effective mentoring, and suggest that mentors receive training in empathic and directive listening techniques.