Answer to Question #272949 in English for REMEDY

Question

Discuss challenges in mentor-student teacher relationships you have experienced during teaching practice.

What did you do to address these challenges to the satisfaction of both parties involved in the mentorship?

Answer 1

Challenges

One issue in mentor-student relationships is when they do not have the same views on what it takes to be an educator. If a student-teaching teacher's practice differs from the teaching pedagogy learned in their education program, deciding which procedures to embrace from their mentor's traditional teaching methods and which strategies to enforce from the standards-based pedagogy learned in their teacher education program becomes a challenge.

There is a lack of consistent professional development from the school district on which one is based. A mentor who has not received such training, which is aligned with both the institution's teacher education program's criteria and standard-based teaching principles, will be unable to comprehend his or her student-teaching teacher's approaches. As a result, their instructional methods will never be the same.

The necessity of providing feedback to students is undervalued. A mentor may not know where a novice student-teacher is in his or her learning to teach development in a circumstance where the student-teacher is a novice. When the mentor is a competent learner in a variety of disciplines and a confident teacher, it can be difficult for him or her to comprehend what sort of feedback and support is required for a novice like his student who requires additional assistance with the teaching content.

Address

If mentors' teaching practices are to be reasonably consistent with reform-based teaching, one option is that they need continuing professional development, not one-time events, to solve such issues.

Apprenticeship experience with their personal histories and teaching perspectives, as well as freshly acquired information and skills from their method courses. It is critical to educate mentors on how to support their student teachers based on their requirements in order to help novice instructors succeed in their first year of teaching.