Mentoring & Supervision (288 items)To section archive

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Across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the educational landscape, creating new professional realities for practicing and future teachers. As teacher educators prepare preservice teachers for the uncertainty of online and in-person teaching, more information is needed around how mentor teachers designed and implemented their emergency online lessons at the beginning of the pandemic. This study explores the topic by analyzing data from 31 mentor teachers surveyed about their teaching experiences between March and June 2020. The findings suggest that most of the mentor teachers defined similar priorities for creating equitable access to their instructional materials. Accordingly, the mentor teachers focused on increasing their students’ access to digital content, designing instruction that considered families’ capacity for support, and encouraging student engagement in online learning. These findings have implications for how teacher educators learn from mentor teachers’ experiences during this unprecedented period, and work to prepare preservice teachers for the challenges and complexities of online teaching—ultimately helping them develop the skills to adapt to future, unfamiliar teaching environments.
Published: 2022
Updated: May. 11, 2022
Continuity of learning and development for children transitioning from pre-compulsory to compulsory education remains challenging in many educational contexts. There is little evidence about the potential of coaching to build teacher capability as a strategy to enhance continuity for children. This article reports details of how a collective case study and the theory of practice architectures framed an investigation of coaching practices aimed at building teacher capability to address student continuity issues. The research endorses a situated (site ontological) approach to building teacher capability to enhance continuity in the early years. Findings identify how site-based conditions influenced (enabled and constrained) coaching practices and transitional continuity.
Published: 2021
Updated: Mar. 09, 2022
These first years of teaching constitute entry stage to the profession and are considered a period of critical importance for determining the new teacher’s professional identity. This study explores the associations between novice teachers’ perspectives of their relationship with their mentors and their professional commitment. This qualitative study utilises data from semi-structured interviews conducted with 35 second-year Israeli teachers (subsequent to a year of internship). The findings indicate an association between novice teachers’ high professional commitment and a functional mentoring relationship and lack of association between novice teachers’ low professional commitment and other types of mentoring relationships. The results and their implications are discussed.
Published: 2021
Updated: Mar. 02, 2022
Most professionalisation programmes to support teacher educators as research supervisors focus on the development of research skills. The methodology of practice-oriented research, in addition to a clear vision on the function, and purpose of student research often receives little attention. At the Amsterdam University of Applied Science, the authors developed such a vision and methodology and studied the development of 17 teacher educators as research supervisors during a programme that introduced this methodology. They questioned participants about affect, and understanding regarding their role as a student research supervisor, and their perception of their competences to perform that role. Results showed that teacher educators became more aware of their role, and became more critical about their own competencies. Growing awareness of the implications of their role as student research supervisors seemed to result in a lower self-efficacy regarding the performance of this role. Implications for the training of teacher educators are discussed.
Published: 2021
Updated: Dec. 16, 2021