Within the professional placement component of pre-service teacher education, mentoring has become a strategy that is used during the practical application of learning to teach. In this paper, we examine mentoring in the pre-service teacher education context by proposing a theoretically based framework for mentoring in this context. Firstly, the nature of mentoring along with mentoring in the context of pre-service teacher education is explored. A mentoring framework that has been developed to enable pre-service teacher educators to maximize the potential use of mentoring during the professional placement component of a pre-service teacher education degree is then proposed.
This research focuses on mentoring in pre-service teacher professional placements. As preservice teachers engage in their professional placement, they have specific perceptions about what will happen and how their mentor teacher will work with them. Survey research was undertaken with first year and final year pre-service teachers to discover their perceptions about the mentoring relationships in which they were involved in during their professional placements. Specifically, the survey focused on the pre-service teachers' role in the mentoring relationship, their mentor teachers' role and the pre-service teachers' expectations of what they will learn during their professional placements. Responses from first year and final year student teachers were compared in order to discover whether their perceptions and expectations change as they progress through their teaching degree.
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