Transcript
INTERVIEWER
We interviewed people who have recently been through the mentoring experience and asked them to describe the mentor role.
SUBJECT 1
It's quite a complex role. There's a pastoral element in kind of the concern and the support that you need to offer to the student teacher. And learning to teach for many people can be very stressful and quite traumatic. But essentially, it's being there to provide the training that they need in schools.
SUBJECT 2
They need to have quite a lot of different skills. They clearly have to be efficient and have to be able to organise experiences, so that students in school can make progress, because there are successful plans laid for them that they can work with and can learn. But they also have to be very good at working with people. They have to be very good at working with students.
They need to be welcoming. They need to be warm. They need to be accepting of people. And they certainly need to give students the feeling that students can make mistakes, that they won't be done for them, that they'll be helped to make progress. But students really need to have great trust in their mentors. And I think that's really a very important quality that really can't be ignored.
INTERVIEWER
So students need to trust their mentors. But what do students themselves think? What's a good mentor to them? I put this question to Daniel Park.
DANIEL PARK
Someone who's prepared to give you the space that you need to get used to being a teacher is to give good feedback. I respond well to positive criticism rather than negative criticism. And to be encouraged is always very helpful.
INTERVIEWER
Daniel Park. Certainly, a mentor has to be well-organised to do the job in the first place. But personal qualities, like approachability, objectivity, and listening skills, were also mentioned by most of our student teachers. In fact, they found them more important than anything else.
SUBJECT 1
I think first and foremost they need to be very approachable. They need to be there for you and to make you feel that you can go to them with any problems, any help, whenever you need it. You really want to feel that they're happy to give you their time whenever you need it.
I think, also, they need to be objective. I think it's very easy for people to sit at the back of a classroom and have too many of their own thoughts about the way they teach and put those onto the way they think you should teach. And I don't really think that's the right way of doing it. They should sit there as impartial as they can, not make a judgement with respect to how they do it, but purely look at how you do it and talk about your skills and what you're good at and not good at. They need to be objective.
SUBJECT 3
I think it's very important for them to be able to listen. They need to be able to hear what a student teacher needs to know what their problems are, what their difficulties are. Especially as many mentors are quite experienced teachers, they've perhaps lost touch a bit with what it's like to be a new teacher.
SUBJECT 4
My mentor was looking after me and one other person. And we were very different. And I think he had to adapt himself to both of our needs, really. So I already thought that was the most important thing. You need to be very good at listening as well, because sometimes it's just like going to a counsellor-- you end up pouring your heart out about things that went wrong. So sometimes, in fact, that's all you need, is someone to listen to you rather than tell you what you did wrong, because you're usually fairly aware of it.