Principals accelerate professional learning through mentoring to enable educators’ selfdirected learning in diverse settings including rural public schools

This study investigated how mentoring could be used by principals in schools in South Africa to develop school leaders and teachers to promote self-directed learning within classrooms. Research accentuates that self-directed learning needs to be embedded as a pedagogical culture through mentoring to impact effectively on learner outcomes. Principals need to enable staff to apply this approach to learning more consistently through mentoring to ensure that learners move forward. Mentoring is identified as one of the most underused interventions to drive school improvement by the inspectorate in England. The researchers aimed to test this claim in South Africa, by developing principals’ mentorship to professionally develop their teams and to enable learner achievement in diverse and rural settings. The study aimed to address the following research question: How do school leaders and principals use mentoring as an intervention to develop school leaders and teachers to promote selfdirected learning within the classroom? The research project provides unique insight into how developing the skills of principals and leadership teams to draw on mentoring, can enable staff to refine their practices by facilitating self-directed learning in diverse schools and classrooms to drive social mobility. Using an interpretivist qualitative case study, the authors explored how mentoring, as an intervention, could be used to develop educators and impact positively on learner outcomes. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with principals, school leaders, and teachers. The data suggest that mentoring made a significant impact on educators’ self-directed learning practices.