Chapter 19
Supporting Mentoring and Assessment
in Practicum Settings: A New Professional
Development Approach for School-Based
Teacher Educators
Simone White and Rachel Forgasz
19.1 Introduction
This chapter examines the professional development of an emerging occupational
group in the Australian context—a group we call‘school-based teacher educa-
tors’—acknowledging and focusing on their learning about the complex work of
teacher education, mentoring, supervising and assessing pre-service teachers.
Teachers who work with pre-service teachers in schools—typically known as
cooperating teachers or supervisors/mentors in schools—are noted for the vital role
they play in the success or otherwise of that experience. The teacher education
discourse and research literature highlight, however, that their work is plagued by
role confusion, and lack of professional learning and preparation, as well as diffi-
culty dealing with the complexity of making judgements and assessing pre-service
teachers (Clarke et al. 2014 ).
While many teachers take on the important work of mentoring over their careers,
to date there has been little attention paid to the professional development needs of
this group, even as they are increasingly required to shift their focus as professional
educators to include the work of teaching pre-service teachers about teaching
(Loughran 2006 ) while also teaching their students. It is to their professional
development that we turn our focus in this chapter. In this way, we endeavor to
build on the understanding of what Boyd et al. ( 2014 ) describe as a‘layered
pedagogy of teacher education’.By‘layering’they describe
S. White (&)R. Forgasz
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Forgasz
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_19
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