Mentoring and the development of reflective practice: concepts and context

Abstract

In a mentoring scheme the responsibility for the professional development in school of a student or newly qualified teacher is taken on by an experienced teacher. Mentoring is a relatively new concept in English Language Teacher Education and its origins lie largely in changes in the theory and practice of Teacher Education in the UK and North America. The overriding message in books and articles published on mentoring has been that the mentor needs to help the student teacher to develop `reflective practice'. This message has at times been imbued with the tenets of humanistic psychology, so that a student teacher's ability to reflect and develop is sometimes seen as dependent on personal change. This paper focuses on what transpired during a mentor training course in Hungary which involved prospective mentors and student English Language teachers. In this course role plays, which were at first designed to provide prospective mentors with the chance to practise giving post-observation feedback, proved to be the stimulus for an exploration of how far the model of mentoring commonly promoted takes sufficient account of contextual factors.