Mentoring Student Teachers: The Growth of Professional Knowledge

The training of teachers is increasingly seen as a matter of partnership between schools and institutions of higher education. There is thus an urgent need within the profession to define more carefully what the role of teachers acting as mentors should be. Clearly, since some aspects of professional knowledge can only be acquired from practical experience in school, hands-on, school-based work assumes a central role in professional preparation.Mentoring Student Teachersdraws on extensive research into students' school-based learning to isolate and analyze those aspects. Like any form of teaching, mentoring, the authors suggest, must be built on a clear understanding of the learning processes it is intended to support. In this book, they report on how students develop their own practical professional knowledge while they are in school and what the role of mentor should be in supporting this highly complex process.