Mentorship reconsidered: A case study of K-12 teachers’ mentor-mentee relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study critically examined the impact of a crisis context (COVID-19 pandemic) on K-12 teachers by placing emphasis on the mentor-mentee dyad through the perspective of the mentee in a large United States public school system. A phenomenological case study was undertaken that used semi-structured interviews to examine 14 early career teachers (mentees) participating in a formal mentoring program during the 2020–2021 school year. The study focused on mentor-mentee relationships by accounting for the single most traumatic and transformative event of the modern era of K-12 public education. The analysis yielded three findings highlighting the impact of COVID-19 on the mentor-mentee dyadic experiences of first- and second-year teachers engaged in a mentoring relationship. The findings indicate that (a) e-mentoring allowed for avoidant behaviors from mentors (b) successful mentoring involves the development of personal relationships between a mentor and mentee, and (c) peer and reverse mentoring became commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public school systems can use these findings to help develop positive mentor and mentee relationships that go beyond the traditional dyadic roles and help reduce stress in a crisis context, while developing a culture where superiority bias is improved. Research implications offer mentoring literature a view to pay more attention to temporal influences during environments of high stress, which may provide more explanatory power on mentorship roles, cultural influences, and social interactions in the course of mentor-mentee practices.