What Remains of Mentor: Investigation on Enduring Perceptions of Former Trainees at the University of Bari

• In Event: Mentoring in Teacher Induction Programs: Helping Beginner Teachers to Teach

Abstract

International documents and specific research confirm an ongoing change in the ‘forms’ of mentoring: from the exclusive guide of expert to the inexperienced - inspired by 'two-dimensional' models - to the network mentoring carried out by multiple organizational actors - inspired by systemic and socio-constructivist models.

Knowing the 'enduring perceptions' of former trainee teachers in the university qualifying course about the mentoring experience. Knowing perceptions about the networker role of mentors in the school context.

A random survey was conducted among graduates of the last three years (2018-2020) to qualification courses in ‘Primary education’ of the University of Bari. 77 former trainees were involved (43% of the 180 total graduated): 100% females, 83% in the age-group 22-30 years; 31.2% with teaching experience. Ad ‘ad hoc’ mixed questionnaire (close and open-ended questions) has been used as collection tool. The synthetic analysis has been realized on quantitative (items 1, 4, 9, 14-18 - through statistical procedure) and qualitative (item 27 - through ‘grounded’ category) data.

After 3 years, 89.6% of the former trainees consider useful the internship experience and 78% the support of mentor. They received more orientation on the practices in the classroom (36.9%), on the organizational structures of the school (23.8%), accompaniment on the direct management of teaching processes (20.7%) and class placement (18.4%) – attachment 1. Moreover, they received greater support in building professional disciplinary competence, less in documentation (fig. 1).
The organizational-didactic competence - which implies team work and contact with families and territory - presents a low correlation (0.41) with the previous teaching experience – Attachment 2. The coding of open answers - attachment 3 – highlighted that the mentor's awareness of being a networker and being able to relate to various figures is important for the trainee.

Although the former trainees have a clear understanding of the role of networker carried out by the mentors, networking activities and skills do not, however, seem to have characterized the internship experience.

The mentor should be a networker, capable of introducing the trainee in the complex context of the school. This is what the policy documents and the former trainees – today on the front lines as teachers - ask for. The interventions to be adopted should concern, on the one hand, a better preparation of each mentor, on the other, a plurality of references from which the trainee can draw inspiration for his actual future practice. The phenomenological construct of ‘enduring perceptions’, derived from qualitative-quantitative data, seems useful to retrospectively know the needs of future teachers.

Authors

• Loredana Perla, University of Bari

• Laura Sara Agrati, University of Bergamo - Bergamo

• Ilenia Amati, Università degli Studi di Bari