Facilitator: Cary Clark

Participants:

This course will explore and define the roles and responsibilities of both the mentor and the mentee. The course will also list and give details of key strategies of mentoring that ensure that the student teacher moves from simple to more complex analysis of teaching and learning.

For the mentor, these roles include being a coach focusing on developing specific teaching skills and strategies, being a critical friend helping, encouraging an challenging the student teacher during the school experience placement and acting as a facilitator when linking with other people in the school.

For the student teacher, some of their responsibilities for professional growth are:

1. being willing to extend and develop their own subject competence,
2. being orientated towards seeing themselves as the learner rather than the teacher and
3. recognising that their images of teaching may not match current educational practice.

The course will cover key mentoring strategies, such as helping the student teacher to examine critically the strengths and weaknesses of lessons by collaborative lesson planning, carefully structured observation and debriefing (co-analysis of practice), and setting and achieving targets.

Student teachers will be provided with the skills of  'using a language for talking about teaching' and using specific tools to analyse and evaluate their own teaching carefully and objectively.

Mentors will be shown how to build trust with the student teacher by understanding the value of being open about their strengths and weaknesses and of being prepared to explore in detail the thinking behind their actions in the classroom. By the end of the course mentors will have been introduced to the basic of how to move the student teacher from simple to more complex analysis of teaching an learning.