Mentoring : What's in it for me?
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In recent years, there has been a shift in teacher education in the Czech Republic towards increasing the number of hours student teachers spend completing practice in schools. At the same time, however, the role of the mentors, the experienced teachers who guide the student teachers, has not been clearly defined. Furthermore, no formal training is provided. Due to a lack of formalization, the relationship between the mentors, the universities and the teacher educators varies enormously ranging from scarce to close contact. As mentors play an increasingly important role in the teachers’ education, we, in our study, set out to learn more about their motives, objectives and needs as well as their beliefs regarding mentoring of student teachers. As an initial step in our investigation, and to map the situation, the study adopted a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews. The participants were teachers of English language at secondary schools with varying degrees of experience from those with some experience to those who are mentoring for the first time. The results of the study suggest that mentors see the role as one way of developing themselves professionally, and hope to get new impetus for their work. In mentoring they largely follow their intuition drawing partly on their own experience as students. Through gaining a better understanding of the position of the mentors we hope to positively influence the cooperation of the major players in teacher education – the students, the mentors and the university educators. |
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