19.4 Mentors Becoming‘Second Order Practitioners’:
The Men/Tee Initiative
Under the policy drive for partnerships noted earlier, different universities and
schools across Australia have forged a variety of school-university partnership
models. The Men/tee model involved the Faculty of Education at Monash
University and one large Secondary school, Keymore College (pseudonym), which
is based across two campuses in Melbourne, Victoria. Simultaneous to their work
with a pre-service teacher in school over afive week teaching block, Men/tee
mentors also participated in a weekly university-led professional learning com-
munity on the school site in order to develop their skills and practices as
school-based teacher educators.
The aforementioned policy and practice imperatives are very much the same
contextual drivers out of which Men/tee arose. In particular, three common prac-
ticum problems drove the project design. First was the persistent problem offinding
placements for pre-service teachers. The second problem emerged as a consequence
of changes that were made by the partner university to the provision of support to
PSTs during their time in schools. The old model in which an academic made a site
visit and observed every PST at least once during theirfinal year of practicum was
replaced by remote support such as email, phone and online discussion forums. In
many ways, it might be argued that such an approach offers better support to PSTs
since they receive consistent and ongoing contact and communication with the
university over the course of their practicum. At the same time, physical absence
from schools meant that this increased contact with PSTs was largely invisible to
school-based personnel who instead read—and experienced—academics’physical
absence as an indication of a decline in university support during the practicum.
Men/tee sought to redress this problem by reintroducing an academic presence in
schools during the practicum. Finally, Men/tee piloted a proactive response to
practicum problems that often arise as a consequence of poor relationships between
pre-service teachers and mentors and problematic mentoring practices.
The pragmatic priorities that drove this pilot were, therefore
- To encourage schools to accept larger numbers of PSTs
- To reintroduce the sense of a strong academic presence in schools
- To better support pre-service teachers and their mentors in order to achieve
quality practicum.
Altogether, Men/tee involved 17 mentors who worked with 17 PSTs over their
final 5 week practicum block, 12 of whom participated in the research component.
Over the course of the 5 weeks, a team of university-based teacher educators (in-
cluding the authors) met weekly after school hours, with these mentors to engage
them in professional learning about mentoring and about the principles that underlie
a‘pedagogy of teacher education’(Loughran 2006 ). Hence the name Men/tee:
Mentor/Teacher Educator Education. It is important to note that the professional
development allocation time was recognized and supported by the school principal.
288 S. White and R. Forgasz