A Case Study on Mentoring in a Teacher Development Program

Problem Statement: Mentorship is defined as a developmental relationship in which a more experienced person helps a less experienced person. It is an ongoing process in which individuals in an organization provide support and guidance to others who can become effective contributors to the goals of the organization. Mentoring process is important for teaching profession where experience is important. In teaching profession low motivation, burn-out or leaving the profession problems may occur if the novice teachers could not get any support in their trainee period. Purpose of the Study: The teacher development program, which has been implemented since October 2009, consists of a component of mentoring for the novice instructors. The study aims to gather mentors view on mentoring process. Method: It is a case study aiming at evaluating the mentors’ views about mentoring program within the teacher development program. In this program, nine mentors were participated and the data for this study was collected from six of them through interviewing in the Spring Term of 2009-2010 academic year. As a result, eight themes were gathered from the interviews about mentoring process as conceptualization of mentor, roles of mentor, reasons of being a mentor, professional development of mentees and mentors, the problems stated, features of learning environment, communication, ethical rules and suggestions for improving the process. Findings and Results: The study reveals some important results. The interviewed mentors indicated the importance of more interaction between mentors and mentees and added not only should the mentees have observed the mentors but also the mentors should have had the opportunity to observe them. Secondly, they underlined the need for increasing the observation time and adding pre- and post- observation stages, making observations more systematical. Thirdly, they emphasized expanding the content of the observation. They suggested the some institutional aspects and other issues in line with to the classroom teaching content be added into the observation. Finally, they stressed the needs of mentor training program for themselves. They believed they had some experience in the teaching but they needed more support on how to work with the novice teachers. Conclusions and Recommendations: Based on these findings, it is suggested that there should be provided more interaction between the parties. The content of the observation should be revised regarding the institutional aspects and other administrational and procedural issues as suggested. Mentors should not be only experienced teachers but also they should have some qualifications. This study highly recommends mentor training program in this kind of development process.