Student Teachers' Perceptions of School-based Mentoring in Initial Teacher Training (ITT)

In recent years school-based mentoring has become an increasingly important aspect of the process by which student teachers begin to learn how to teach. This article reports secondary PGCE students' evaluations of their school-based mentoring experiences. The data were collected via in-depth interviews with 16 student teachers and self-complete questionnaires completed by 224 student teachers from four different training courses in central and northern England in 1999. The main findings are that: (1) student teachers consider mentoring to be a, if not the, key aspect of school-based ITT; whilst (2) student teachers' accounts of their school-based experiences suggest that teacher-mentors are not always successful in creating conditions for effective student teacher learning.