The purpose of this study was to investigate the change of beginning science teachers' inquiry-oriented teaching practice through mentoring program.
Participants in this study are three mentor teachers and three mentee teachers. Three mentee teache...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the change of beginning science teachers' inquiry-oriented teaching practice through mentoring program.
Participants in this study are three mentor teachers and three mentee teachers. Three mentee teachers are middle school science teachers who have less than four years teaching experience. Also three science teachers participated in it as mentors, who have more than twelve years teaching experience. They gave advice and consultations to mentee teachers. We collected data such as video recordings of mentee teachers' classes, lesson plans, recordings of one to one mentoring and RTOP class observation reports. Mentor teachers observed and analyzed five classes of each mentee-teacher. RTOP(The Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol) developed by ACEPT(The Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers) was used to analyze the teaching practice on each science class.
Before the mentoring program, mentee teachers' teaching was more focused on concept-oriented and teacher-oriented. They rarely used inquiry-elements including prediction, reasoning, hypothesizing and students were not actively engaged in communicative interactions in a classroom. But during the mentoring program, mentee teachers recognized and responded to student diversity and encouraged all students to participate fully in science learning. Mentee teachers' teaching has changed towards students- oriented, teachers and students collaborated in pursuit of ideas, and students often initiated new activities relevant to an inquiry.
As a result, this mentoring program provided for mentee teachers that the opportunities to reflect on their own teaching and reform their classes. The results show that school-centered mentoring program is very helpful to enhance beginning science teachers' inquiry-oriented teaching ability.