INVESTIGATING INFORMAL MENTORING PROCESS IN TERMS OF ITS POTENTIAL TO SUPPORT STUDENT TEACHER IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT: A CASE STUDY

2022-3-11
Fazlıoğlu, Dilek
This case study aimed to investigate how an informal mentoring relationship among student teachers and mentor teachers has worked to support student teachers’ professional identity development. The study also aimed to explore the potential of the informal mentoring process on student teacher identity development from the perspectives of student teachers and mentor teachers. The study was conducted within the scope of a classroom management course offered at the faculty of education at a well-known public university in Turkey in the 2020-2021 Spring Term. The multiple data resources included video recordings, semi-structured interviews with mentor teachers, and semi-structured interviews with student teachers. Video recordings captured the informal mentoring process in which 22 student teachers and five mentor teachers codesigned a lesson plan related to a classroom management topic in groups. Also, five mentor teachers and eleven student teachers participated in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis method was used for data analysis. All data were analyzed utilizing Izadinia’s (2018) principles as a theoretical lens through MAXQDA (2020) software. The data analysis revealed that the informal v mentoring process has the potential to support student teachers’ professional identity development. Mentor teachers made use of several principles that has the potential to inform student teachers’ professional identity development such as building and maintaining a strong relationship, offering support and encouragement, providing ongoing feedback, making time for reflective activities, creating a positive environment, enabling awareness, self-identifications, and future projections.

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Citation Formats
D. Fazlıoğlu, “INVESTIGATING INFORMAL MENTORING PROCESS IN TERMS OF ITS POTENTIAL TO SUPPORT STUDENT TEACHER IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT: A CASE STUDY,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.