All the mentors participating in the pilot project mentioned that being a mentor is a very positive experience. All the mentors had a good relationship with their mentees that was considered a very important aspect to have mutually fruitful collaboration. Therefore it is necessary to make sure that if the relationship between the mentor and mentee is problematic, action has to be taken fast and solution that suits both parties has to be figured out.
Mentoring has been described as a relationship between two people with the aim of purposeful mutual influence on each other (Bearman et al., 2007).
The role of mentor and supervising teacher should be taken by different people because the tasks are different and are difficult to distinguish if taken by one person. As it was pointed out by the mentor teachers and also supervising teachers, mentoring is a wider and longer process, seen more as a journey (Awaya et al., 2003). The mentors also felt that they were responsible in providing support in adapting the teacher students to the school environment (Hall et al., 2008).
The mentor teachers feel a great responsibility during the period of the teacher students‘ practice and for being efficient and successful they also need support from the university. Also, the supervising teachers want to be in more contact with the university. To build a trusting relationship between the schools and univeristy, sometimes new ways of collaboration have to be created, like the network of Innovation Schools at the University of Tartu (Pedaste et al. 2014, Pedaste et al.2015).
The biggest challenges of keeping up an effective practice network that consist of so many people, is communication. It was especially the mentor teachers that hoped for more communication with supervising teachers, but also with the university. It is important to choose the most suitable ways of communication. In general, teachers are used to reading e-mails and this seems the best channel for sharing information, but other ways of communication could be discussed with the teachers.
Therefore to build a well-functioning relationship between the mentors and supervising teachers and the university, the following actions should be taken into consideration:
Agree on the communication channels (e-mail, webpage) and use different channels for different information.
Agree who has to organize and how often the mutual seminars where mentor teachers, supervising teachers and university members all participate.
Organize the students‘ basic practice during a period when the students will not have any other obligations at the university.
Give students the theoretical introduction about reflection processes before they start their practice period.
Organise trainings to the mentors.
Suggest relevant reading to the mentors, because often they don‘t have time to search for the materials themselves.
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Appreciate the work of mentors and supervisors.
A further research should be done to on the mentor teachers actual professional development to deeper understand the effectiveness of being a mentor as a way of professional development of the mentor teacher herself or himself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This study was conducted in the context of a research and development project supported by the Eduko project of the European Social Fund. We would like to acknowledge the Innovation School research group for their valuable comments.
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