Towards decentralised and more school-focused teacher preparation and professional development in Zimbabwe: the role of mentoring

The last decade has witnessed a pronounced trend in many countries of shifting from university- or college-based models of teacher preparation and professional development to more field-based models. Zimbabwe is on the threshold of a similar movement. Field-based models, however, tend to rely heavily on mentor involvement. In this article the authors examine the specific situation of Zimbabwe in this regard and generate research questions on mentoring that arise naturally from a consideration of a number of contextual features. The main questions have to do with the nature of experienced teacher to experienced teacher mentoring, and the content and process of subject-specific mentoring. This article therefore makes a contribution to the continuing discussion and building up in the literature of a knowledge base on mentoring-based models of teacher education.