Designing and Implementing a Mentoring Program to Support Clinically-Based Teacher Education

Abstract

This article describes one teacher preparation program's approach to designing and implementing a mentoring program to support clinically-based teacher education. The design for the program is based on an interview study that compared the mentoring experiences of 18 teachers across three different contexts: student teaching, early field experiences, and entry year teaching. The findings were used to extend field experiences, to develop a clinical curriculum that clearly articulated university expectations, and to create a series of three mentoring workshops. In the description of the mentoring workshops, we show how we developed a curriculum for professional development of mentor teachers that includes a clear articulation of teacher candidate activities, co-teaching approaches, and mentoring strategies needed at different levels of teacher candidate development.