Mentoring primary school student teachers in Turkey: Seeing it from the perspectives of student teachers and mentors

As the mentoring program has currently constituted a central component in the partnership established between primary schools and teacher education institutions, this research aimed to investigate the practice of mentoring from the perspectives of student teachers and class mentors. The data were collected by means of open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews from the participation of 55 primary school student teachers. Supplementary data were gathered through semi-structured interviews from five class mentors. The results demonstrate important issues such as the unshared understanding of student teachers' teaching experiences between class mentors and the teacher education institution, and that the mentoring program is inadequate in terms of time management. It is suggested that the class mentors should be helped to open up an important opportunity for how to evaluate their practices in order to evaluate those which the student teachers experience.