The extent to which mentor teachers are able to address mentees' individual needs is an important factor in the success of mentoring. A two-dimensional model of mentor teacher roles in mentoring dialogues, entitled MERID, is explored empirically. Data regarding five aspects of mentoring dialogues were collected, using a sample of 20 transcriptions of mentoring dialogues, in which 112 topics were discussed and 440 mentor teacher utterances emerged. Correlations between the five aspects were determined and a cluster analysis was conducted. There is empirical support for the model. It is a useful framework to promote reflection on mentor teachers' supervisory behaviour.
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The dialogue between a mentor teacher and a prospective teacher is a key element in the supervision of prospective teachers in the workplace. This literature study deals with the issue of how to conceptualize the supervisory behaviour of mentor teachers in mentoring dialogues by systematically examining empirical literature on aspects of mentor teachers' behaviour during dialogues with prospective teachers. From the findings a model is derived which can be used to describe and map mentor teachers' behaviour in mentoring dialogues. The model may be helpful in the further development of the quality of mentor teachers' behaviour in mentoring dialogues.
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Mentoring dialogues play an important role in the supervision of prospective teachers. Mentor teachers have the dual role of guiding the students in the workplace and of stimulating students to reflect and learn from their teaching experiences. Does this happen in practice? This study describes the supervisory behavior of mentor teachers during their mentoring dialogues with prospective teachers by analysing 4 aspects of the dialogue: content, mentor teachers' role, the phases and time. There were three phases in the analysis of the literature. The results indicate that while teachers are effective in the guidance of prospective teachers in the workplace, they are not so effective in the area of stimulating reflection in the prospective teacher. In the mentoring dialogues it is usually the mentor teacher who is the dominant interlocutor; raising issues of organization, directing the prospective teacher in a prescriptive manner, deciding the content of the dialogue, not structuring the dialogue in phases and doing most of the talking. However, studies in this area vary greatly in the presentation of the issues and offer little coherence or correlation. So after looking at the literature, we propose a model where the roles of the mentor teachers can be catagorised and where the data collected can be correlated with the existing literature.
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