Editorial: Mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as an enterprise

Editorial on the Research Topic
Mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as an enterprise

This Research Topic entitled Mentoring, Coaching, and Tutoring as an Enterprise includes research from scholars who aimed to provide further development of the concepts of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as an enterprise. What is enterprise or enterprise development? In the education sphere, we define enterprise in the context of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as the investment of time, energy, and human resources to help educators or students to improve their lives and the lives of those they touch, whether it be through long-term or short-term support. Encouraging mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as an enterprise for teachers in schools or professors and students in universities fosters self-awareness of their strengths and limitations, in addition to learning from peers' practices and experiences, creating a support network, identifying the importance of professional growth opportunities, and applying new instructional strategies or programming.

Mentoring, coaching, and tutoring have emerged as critical components for building human capacity as they focus on talent development and on upskilling and reskilling in modern enterprises. These three components, independently or in combination, contribute to the personal and professional growth of employees in terms of their instructional capacity development, job skills, and general performance and success of schools. Mentoring involves a developmental relationship, built over time as trust is developed. It may manifest itself as a more experienced or knowledgeable person guiding a less experienced or knowledgeable person, or it could be a peer-to-peer mentoring approach. A mentor may be assigned by the school, university, or industry administration; a mentor also may be self-selected by the mentee based on interest or job-alike skills and expertise.

Mentoring facilitates the transfer of implicit knowledge, shapes organizational culture, and builds future leaders, and enhances current leaders (Garvey and Stokes, 2022; Irby et al., 2022; Pashmforoosh et al., 2023). Megginson et al. (2020) underlined mentoring's role in offering guidance and support, instrumental in navigating workplace complexities, thus contributing to individual and organizational resilience.

Coaching involves an experienced individual who guides an employee through a structured process that targets a specific performance event of job-related skill for enhancement, improvement, or progress enhancing an individual's skills, competencies, or performance related to their job. Coaching is a short-term relationship. A coach may be engaged for the employee by the school, university, or industry administration; a coach may be sought and engaged by the employee. Coaching is effective in addressing specific developmental needs and performance issues within an organization (Parsloe et al., 2022) or school enterprise (Kraft et al., 2018). More specifically, coaching has been found to improve problem-solving skills and increase workforce adaptability (Parsloe et al., 2022).

Tutoring is similar to coaching, but the time for engagement with the tutor is even more truncated than that of a coach, and tutoring hones in on specific skills to enhance or improve (Irby, 2018). Topping (2000) defined tutoring as “people who are not professional teachers helping and supporting the learning of others in an interactive, purposeful, and systematic way. It is most usually done on a one-to-one basis, in a pair” (p. 3). Topping further noted that tutors do not have to be experts, but it is best if they are skilled in some way in the tutoring topic in which they are engaged.

The concepts of mentoring, tutoring, and coaching are related; yet there are differences as well. Irby (2012) stated, “mentors can coach, but coaches hardly ever mentor, and mentors and coaches can tutor, but tutors rarely mentor or coach” (p. 297). There are numerous collective and individual contributions of these three components in developing a competent, nimble, and effective workforce and a competitive enterprise. However, implementing these components does not come without challenges. According to Postlethwaite and Schaffer (2019), challenges include resource constraints, cultural misunderstandings, and a lack of a plan for inclusion in the organization. Even with such challenges, we postulate that the convergence of human capital and human resource aspects of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring represents a powerful and holistic approach to enterprise development. Each component addresses different aspects of learning and skill development, creating a comprehensive framework for considering mentoring, coaching, and tutoring as an enterprise. Thus, this journal issue includes research from scholars who have delved into the dynamics of how mentoring, coaching, and tutoring contribute to enterprise success.

Du et al., in their article, Amplifying Similarity to Promote College STEM instructor-student Mentoring Relationship Quality, conducted a cluster randomized trial study with a large and diverse sample of instructors and undergraduates enrolled in an undergraduate course in biology at 13 universities across the United States. “Creating Birds of a Feather” (CBoaF) was used to promote perceptions of shared similarities (psychological similarity), which in turn should promote the quality of instructor-student mentoring relationships. As a result of these findings, the CBoaF intervention has the potential to improve undergraduate perceptions of instructor-student psychological similarity and, therefore, to improve the quality of the instructor-student mentoring relationship.

In the article, The Use of the Individual Development Plan at Minority Serving Institutions, Chang et al. explored individual development plan (IDP) implementation at 504 minority-serving institutions that primarily serve African American, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native-American populations. A systematic review of IDP tools and policies was conducted at each minority-serving institution. The process of mentoring included several crucial components and implementation strategies; however, multicultural mentoring guidance and psychosocial support were not sufficiently addressed. IDP research lays the foundation for future research on supporting minority-serving institutions.

In the next article, Building Inclusive Excellence in STEM: A 15-year Analysis and Lessons Learned of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. Program at The University of South Florida, Diaz-Elsayed et al. conducted qualitative research with Ph.D. students of historically underrepresented minority backgrounds in science and engineering. In the period 2005–2020, 136 graduate students were supported, of whom 87% are expected to earn doctorates. In the study, the researchers found that the choice of applying and enrolling at the University of South Florida was largely driven by the alignment of research interests with potential advisors, adequate funding, and positive interactions with mentors, enrolled students, and alumni who demonstrated a welcoming environment. The researchers present 10 practices for mentoring doctoral students, including creating and promoting an inclusive environment and focusing on the needs of students.

To assess the efficacy of a novel mentoring program in fostering the development of transversal competence and giving students a well-rounded education, Crespi and López carried out a quasi-experimental study, which they report in their article, Mentoring Impact on Transversal Competence's Development. The researchers found that the degree of intrapersonal competency acquisition varied significantly between the pre- and post-treatment periods. The results show that the mentoring program is a good illustration of how to build intrapersonal competencies, which helps students develop thoroughly.

In the article, Engaging in Continuous Improvement: Implications for Educator Preparation Programs and Their Mentors, Brondyk conducted a mixed methods study to examine how one Educator Preparation Program designed and used an assessment tool to promote growth in their teacher candidates. The results show that as time went on, the mentors' practices grew increasingly developmentally focused. This implies that participating in the process of developing, modifying, and utilizing an internally designed instrument helps to foster a common identity that embodies the program's values and gives everyone direction.

Fehérvári and Varga conducted a qualitative systematic review of seven databases between 2013 and 2021 that use mentoring to prevent early school leaving, which is presented in the final article of this Research Topic, Mentoring as Prevention of Early School Leaving. A systematic search during this time frame yielded 25 studies. The researchers set out this systematic review to determine the target populations, the roles of mentors, as well as the objectives and results of the mentoring programs in the interventions carried out in these studies. The studies highlight both community- and school-based mentoring programs with a focus on North American and European countries. Because few studies were addressing younger age groups, the results indicate that the studies' primary focus was on secondary school target groups. They also emphasized that the successful implementation of mentoring programs and the educational environments in which they are used, as well as the quality of mentors and their relationships with mentees, are all critical components of the success of mentoring.

The editors are pleased to bring our readers a first in the arena of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring which is a view of the three as an enterprise. The scholars represented in this Research Topic have provided what this enterprise or enterprise development is in education. Within the context of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring, enterprise has been addressed by an investment of time, energy, and human resources that have aided educators or students to improve their lives and the lives of those they touch, whether it be through long-term or short-term support.

Author contributions

BI: Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. RP: Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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