Investigating the role of mentoring and training on forensics educators’ feelings of self-efficacy, burnout, and belonging: a scoping review

ABSTRACT The main duties of a speech and debate director, otherwise called a forensics educator, include coaching, teaching, budgeting, and travel coordination. Graduate students often receive assistantships to work as an assistant director or even the director of a speech and debate team, but some students do not get the mentoring they need to be successful in these positions. We argue the extent to which coaches are mentored and trained in speech and debate will impact their feelings of self-efficacy, burnout, and belonging as well as the future coaching style they adopt. Therefore, in the following scoping review, we focus on the question: “What does the literature discuss about the impacts of mentoring on self-efficacy, burnout, coaching style, and belonging for coaches of speech and debate teams?” The results of this review enable us to understand more about how the outcomes of mentoring in the forensics debate space have been discussed. Doing so allows us to make arguments about the current state of speech and debate research, and to make recommendations for future scholarship.