Two’s company, three’s a crowd? The student teacher, the mentor and the university tutor

Abstract

In the absence of a school-university partnership in the context of Initial Teacher Education, and in the process of introducing such partnerships and mentoring programmes, a small study was conducted among student teachers on a PGCE course. This exploration sought teacher students’ their views if mentoring by school subject teachers were to be introduced. It also explored their perceptions of the situation that currently characterizes their field placement, namely one in which supervision is carried out by university tutors and in which the cooperating teacher’s role is unspecified and the support given can range from highly useful to perfunctory. The small group of student teachers were largely favourable to the idea and this was not unrelated to their experiences during their teaching practice.