Clarifying Pre-service Teacher Perceptions of Mentor Teachers’ Developing Use of Mentoring Skills

Source: This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 27, Issue 6,
Author(s): Paul Hennissen, Frank Crasborn, Niels Brouwer, Fred Korthagen, Theo Bergen, " Clarifying Pre-service Teacher Perceptions of Mentor Teachers’ Developing Use of Mentoring Skills", Pages 1049–1058, Copyright Elsevier (August 2011)

The purpose of this study is to clarify how pre-service teachers perceive mentor teachers’ use of mentoring skills.

Sixty stimulated-recall interviews were conducted, each in connection with a previously recorded mentoring dialogue.

A quantitative analysis showed that six types of mentoring skills appeared to be perceived by pre-service teachers as offering emotional support and five others as offering task assistance.

After mentor teachers were trained in mentoring skills, shifts in their frequencies of use of distinct skills, as observed by independent raters, corresponded to a considerable extent with shifts in frequencies of pre-service teacher perceptions of mentor teachers’ mentoring behaviour.