MENTOR COACHING TO HELP PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS IN DESIGNING AN EFFECTIVE LESSON PLAN

Abstract

Abstract: This paper investigates how mentor coaching, which is intended to prepare preservice teachers of English as a Foreign Language in facing their teaching practices, help them design lesson plans. A lesson plan, as Farrell (2002) stated, is a collection or a summary of a teacher’s thoughts about what will be covered during a lesson. This means that before coming to the teaching process, a teacher should prepare systematic steps to be conducted in a class in order to reach the objective of a lesson. However, most pre-service teachers are confused with the designing process of lesson plan that is how to articulate the government curriculum into operational details. For example, they do not know which activities to include in the lesson plan, and they do not understand how to determine indicators or “enabling objectives” (Brown, 2007) for assessing students’ achievement in the lesson. Therefore, mentor coaching is seen as one of alternatives in helping pre-service teachers. Mentor coaching, as Nolan (2007, cited in Zepeda, 2012, p. 165) said, is a “structured process whereby an experienced person introduces, assists, and supports a less-experienced person (the protege) in a personal and professional growth process.” In the context of this study, the experienced person refers to the teacher/the lecturer in the class and the less-experienced person in this context refers to the pre-service teachers or student teachers. This study used action research as the method. Furthermore, the data were obtained by distributing questionnaire and collecting pre-service teachers’ lesson plans as well as conducting an interview. In addition, after having designed a lesson plan with mentor coaching technique, the pre-service teachers were asked to reflect the process in order to gain their perception about the mentor coaching technique. It is important to find what they think and feel about this mentor coaching process because it is expected that this type of coaching will be useful in helping pre-service teachers to write an effective lesson plan.