TPC Journal V8, Issue 1 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 1 47 Hulse, 2010). This gap in the literature is concerning given that new counselor educators reported mentoring and feedback on their teaching by senior faculty members was helpful in enhancing their pedagogical skills (Magnuson, Shaw, Tubin, & Norem, 2004). Type and Style of Teaching Mentorship In contrast to discrete faculty–student interactions or training episodes (Black, Suarez, & Medina, 2004), mentor relationships may occur over months and years. Kram (1985) has characterized these relationships as career (teaching skills) and psychosocial (mentor–mentee relationship) types. Career mentoring refers to the act of fostering skills development and sharing field-related content to mentees, and psychosocial mentoring pertains more to the interpersonal and relational aspects of entering a field (e.g., emotional support and working through self-doubt; Curtin, Malley, & Stewart, 2016). Both career and psychosocial mentoring types, or some combination, are used by academic faculty mentors (Curtin et al., 2016). But it is uncertain if these, or any other specific mentoring types, are used for teaching mentorships in counselor education. Teaching mentorships of all types allow faculty members to be flexible, emphasize multiple aspects of being a teacher, and allow for the inclusion of multiple mentors (Borders et al., 2011). Teaching mentorships transpire through a variety of formal (more structured and planned) and informal (less structured and spontaneous) mentorship styles (Borders et al., 2012). For example, a CEDS may experience teaching mentorship as part of a structured pedagogy course (formal), or have an informal conversation with their faculty advisor about teaching experiences spontaneously during an advising session. Given the complexities and importance of mentor relationships in counselor training, little is known about either formal or informal styles. Thus, it is hardly surprising uncertainty exists regarding counselor educators’ preferred ways of mentoring in general (Borders et al., 2012) and mentoring in teaching in particular (S. F. Hall & Hulse, 2010). We found no evidence in the counselor education literature describing common styles of teaching mentorship used by counselor educators. This is concerning given that faculty members tend to mentor in the manner that they were mentored (L. A. Hall & Burns, 2009), and that CEDS’ mentorship experiences are influential in shaping their careers as future counselor educators (Borders et al., 2011). Our purpose was to learn more about how counselor educators understand and use their own teaching mentorship styles, thus requiring that we measure aspects of sample members’ subjective understanding of this phenomenon. Therefore, we set out to answer the following research question: What are counselor educators’ preferred styles of engaging in teaching mentorships with CEDS? Method Because Q methodology objectively analyzes subjective phenomena, such as people’s preferences and opinions on a topic (Stephenson, 1935), it was selected for this study to reveal the structure of counselor educators’ perspectives (i.e., factors) on the teaching mentorship styles used for preparing CEDS to teach. Q methodology embodies the relative strengths of quantitative and qualitative methodologies by drawing on the depth and richness of qualitative data and the objective rigor of factor analysis to analyze data (Shemmings, 2006). Participants The participants (N = 25) eligible for this study: (a) were currently employed as a full-time faculty member in a counselor education doctoral program and (b) had accrued at least one year of experience mentoring CEDS in graduate teaching as a counselor educator. Twenty-five is a sufficient