Getting Beyond “Gut Feeling”: Understanding How Mentors Judge Readiness to Teach

Source: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 43, Issue 2, 2015, pages 143-155

Three research instruments were designed to explore how mentors judge readiness to teach during final practicum placements. This article describes the three instruments.
It discusses how the three tasks worked as ways to understand how people judge readiness to teach and as ways to develop mentors’ judgement making.

While there was broad agreement about what was important in this judgment, the data from all three instruments suggest that individual judges rely on their own experience and frames of reference when deciding about readiness to teach, leading to variability in the decisions they make.