University of Derby
About Us
The University of Derby has four partner colleges: Derby, Loughborough, South East Derbyshire and Stephenson. We run both full-time and part-time post-compulsory teacher training courses.
Pre-service provision is based at the university in Derby, where students are placed in local colleges. In-service provision is delivered at the partner sites and at the university.
Subject-specialist mentors had been part of delivery in a ‘critical friend’ role for some years, but the team wanted to incorporate these skills as part of additional observations of teaching, to develop subject-specialist pedagogy further. Mentor training had also been available, but there had been no focus on the observation of teaching, and the decision was therefore taken to include this in the mentor-training sessions.
There are about 200 students in training across the partnership, of whom 110 are in their second year. The focus was on second-year students, as all partner colleges deliver year two.
"Our pilot focused on the use of subject-specialist mentors as part of the process of observing trainee teachers teaching, in-service, in their second year of training. In line with Ofsted’s emphasis on subject-specialist pedagogy, we wanted to offer trainees more support, and greater opportunity for reflective practice, by having the subject specialist, as well as the initial teacher training (ITT) tutor, looking at classroom practice. We hoped this would raise the profile of subject-specialist mentors and professionalise their role."
Resources
Evaluation report - PDF format
Case study
Case study - printable version - Word format
Observation of teaching pro-forma - Word format
Observation of teaching criteria (to support use of the pro-forma) - Word format
Mentor Training Booklet - Word format
Mentor Training PowerPoint - PowerPoint
‘Talking Heads’ Summary Video Clip of Project - streaming video (7 minutes)