Mentoring in the Context of Academic Work: Responsibility and Accountability

The teaching activity, including the didactic design, is structured in various forms of feedback. The main form (professional-administrative) is the control, carried out through current monitoring, hierarchical inspections and annual evaluations, and followed by the granting of teaching degrees and gratifications. As part of the school activity, the mentoring activity is subject to the same institutional forms, but the feedback it involves has a more flexible and continuous character, decisively influenced by the specificity of adult training, marked by the proportionality between correcting errors and suggesting proactive solutions. In this sense, the present study aims to highlight the fact that if judging the results of the teacher (and) according to the results of the students (given the natural inequality of individuals and generations) rises a serious problem of reliability, and even a deontological one, the assessment of the mentors’ activity according to the results of mentoring (the same, with some exceptions, throughout the professional life) is perfectly legitimate, constituting the evaluative core itself – hence the special value of the mentoring feedback: it implies both responsibility for the professional evolution of mentors and accountability for their occupational career, with transposition into the evolution of students, but also into that of the school institution.