The Teaching Practicum and the Mentoring Activity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Literature Review

• In Event: Learning to Teach in Times of COVID-19: Challenges, Trends, and Concerns

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has provoked colleges and universities closures worldwide and teaching preparation programs have been affected in various ways. It has also opened uncertain scenarios with no back-up plans for online teaching challenging teachers’ professional skills (author and author, 2020). The practicum experience as it is school-context dependent has been heavily affected forcing the universities to explore new alternatives to carry it out (Sasaki et al., 2020). Furthermore, the role of the school mentor as the student teachers’ guide to face the challenges in the classroom, as well as for the development of their professional skills and the construction of their identity (Lawson, Çakmak, Gündüz & Buser, 2015) has been challenged. This paper reports on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) focusing on studies published from January 2020 to June 2021 about the practicum and mentoring. Four databases were used: Scopus, WOS, ERIC, and Google Scholar including the following chain keywords: practicum/teacher internship+preservice teachers and/or teacher candidates+teacher preparation+teacher education+COVID-19. The initial number of documents found (n=973) was reduced after applying the exclusion criteria (e.g., not about COVID-19 and/or Teacher Education) to n=38. They were analyzed according to three categories: descriptive (e.g., country, document type, source open access), content (e.g., topic, objectives, type of mentoring) and methodological analysis (e.g., research design, sample, method, data analysis, etc.).
Findings show that the documents were published from 27 countries indicating the global spread of the COVID-19. However, two thirds of the studies come from America and Europe. In terms of content, 39.5% of the papers specifically address mentoring opting for e-mentoring in all cases. Around 80% of the papers focus on mentors’ reasoning, beliefs and identity. The rest describes mentors’ performance and behaviors (Barak, 2015). The most frequent topic revolves around “New Teacher Education strategies” (31.6%) and “online teaching methodologies” (21.1%). In regard to the methodology, 86.8% were empirical studies adopting qualitative research (75.8%). Phenomenology (22.9%) and case studies (17.9%) were the most frequent approaches. Only 15.4% conducted reliability and validity checks. This study offers an overview of the practicum and mentoring research during the COVID-19 and the changes introduced by the pandemic. The transition to online mentoring completely changes the usual ways of conceiving the practicum experience as the supervisory activity (Burns, Danyluk, Kapoyannis & Kendrick, 2020) loses the contextual factor, a key factor for learning. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned related to the redefinition of mentors’ roles in (new) hybrid contexts for professional learning which calls for more expansive and diversified approaches to mentoring.

Authors

• Juanjo Mena, Universidad de Salamanca

• Lúcia AMORES GARCÍA, University of Salamanca

• Maria A. Flores, Minho University, Portugal