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Liverpool Community College logo Liverpool Community College - Case Study for the Mentoring Pilot

 

Introduction and background to the project

 

In September 2003, Liverpool Community College introduced a mentoring scheme for students on the City & Guilds (C&G) 7407 initial teacher training (ITT) qualification. C&G course guidance required that all students should be observed by a subject-specialist mentor. By the end of the first year of running the mentoring scheme we had posed ourselves a number of key questions, which appear below. Our pilot study was set up to focus on, and address, the first three of these questions.

 

  1. What are the requirements for being a mentor?
  2. What relationship should there be between the mentor and mentee?
  3. How can subject mentors be provided when learners are isolated in location or subject area?
  4. What is the role of a subject mentor in an ITT course?
    • Should the subject specialist mentor be giving feedback on general teaching skills such as planning, effective communication skills, etc?
    • What if the subject-specialist mentor has areas of practice that do not fit in with teacher training requirements? (For example: ‘You can’t do lesson plans for this sort of session; we have to be flexible.’)
    • What if the subject-specialist mentor is not familiar with what is required on teacher training programmes and misleads students?
    • What happens if a mentor finds that a trainee teacher does not have good subject knowledge and is therefore being ineffective in the classroom?
    • Can/Should the subject-specialist mentor ‘fail’ a student?
    • How does the mentor – particularly one in a different institution – effectively liaise with teacher training staff to support the educational process?
  5. How does subject mentoring link to a more generic mentoring role?

 

Key idea
"The project set out to investigate, plan and evaluate an ITT mentoring system that would be capable of covering a range of programmes and be flexible enough to cater for the specific needs of a variety of organisations. "

 

Aims and objectives

 

Our objectives were to:

 

  1. Clarify the job role of the subject mentor
  2. Investigate the roles and responsibilities of the mentee, subject mentors and organisations
  3. Identify the issues in relation to recruitment and selection of subject mentors
  4. Identify an appropriate training programme for new and existing subject mentors
  5. Investigate organisational issues for delivering good practice in subject mentoring in ITT and outline recommendations and a range of strategies for good practice.