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The high resignation rate for first year teachers is related to lack of effective mentoring, difficult work settings, lack of resources, and isolation from other adults, ill-defined expectations, value performance standards, and inconsistent assessment by poorly trained evaluators (California Commission of Teacher Credentialing, 1992).

Mentoring is considered to be one of the most effective ways of supporting student teachers and novice teachers in initial school experiences. Mentoring is associated with a wide range of benefits in various professional disciplines. Mentoring is popular in medicine, social services, law, city management, industry, the military, banking, sports and performing arts (Strong and Baron, 2004), among others. Mentoring has been increasingly acknowledged and used in training of new teachers in school-based practice in the last decades (Hobson, 2002). It is one of the major sources of professional learning for student teachers during initial teacher education which is currently receiving much attention in developed countries.

Colley (2002) studied the literature about mentoring and found that the use of mentoring occupied a positive policy stance. She noted that mentoring has become an integral component of initial teacher education in a number of mainly western capitalist countries, and in a wide range of fields. Mentoring is being explored as a potential mode of professional development, as an avenue for improving practice, as a strategy for retaining teachers, and as a catalyst for social change in schools (Smith and Ingersoll, 2004; Whitaker, 2003). Mentoring conveys certain assumptions about the teacher’s role in the production and use of knowledge about teaching. As a mentor, the teacher is expected to transform their knowledge of practice and guide a less-skilled student teacher. This can be a particularly complex work in this era of paradigmatic shift in which knowledge is situated in the individual (Katz and Bay, 2007).

In a mentoring scheme the responsibility for the professional development of a student teacher is taken on by an experienced teacher, called a mentor. Mentors are required to provide close support to student teachers in lesson preparation, pupil learning needs and abilities diagnoses, classroom instructional processes, conferences and reflection. The mentor is also responsible for inducting student teachers into the school community and to take up responsibilities as normal school teachers. Lam and Fung (2001) suggested that mentors ought to be competent in subject knowledge and pedagogy, should be available, be approachable, have tact and empathy, should not be too directive, should be good listeners, and should give constructive criticism and guidance.

Kram (1995) highlighted the psychosocial functions of a mentor which include counselling, friendship and acceptance-and-confirmation. School-based mentors are viewed as ‘facilitators’ whose task is to provide an affective climate in which an exploration can be carried out of what underlies classroom behaviour in terms of student teachers' personal beliefs and attitudes. It is assumed that as long as mentors create the appropriate conditions, student teachers will be ready and willing to participate in a voyage of professional learning exploration (Kullman, 1998).

Lam and Fung (2001) noted that cooperating teachers who are regarded as good mentors should:

(a) Help student teachers to take responsibility for their own teaching experiences; (b) Facilitate student teachers’ learning from each other;

(c) Leave the initiative with the student teacher; (d) Encourage risk taking and expectations;

(e) Encourage student teachers to see the world as less straightforward;

(f) Allow experimentation in the classroom and the student teacher to follow their own interests, where the mentor is not over-prescriptive.

The views of the mentor functions above appear to be in line with an ‘educative practicum’ mentoring model (Zeichner, 1996). An ‘educative practicum’ regards teaching as a complex activity where student teachers need to develop capacity in making intelligent decisions to handle ambiguous and challenging situations. In an ‘educative practicum model’ of mentoring, student teachers need to engage in intelligent teaching, they need to experiment and to develop novel ways of teaching, they need to make and test hypotheses about

Within this mentoring model, education theories learned in college are not supposed to be applied straightforwardly to complex, ambiguous and dynamic educational situations (Zeichner, 1996). Student teachers have to work with mentors to engage in intelligent teaching and intelligent teaching implies the interpretation of unique situations through exploration and investigation, reflection, judgement, deliberation and decisions (Zeichner, 1996). Feiman-Nemser (2001) recommends ‘educative mentoring’ which has two dimensions: emotional support, providing a comfortable relationship and environment for the new teacher to develop; and professional support based on a principled understanding of student teachers and how they learn.

The other model of mentoring proposes a spectrum of required skills with overlap. These functions are:

(a) Guiding/leading/advising/supporting; (b) Coaching/educating/enabling;

(c) Organising/managing;

(d) Counselling/interpersonal (Harrison et al., 2005).

The functions outlined above seem to relate to an ‘apprenticeship model’ of mentoring. However, initial teacher education does not appear as apprenticeship, a kind of unquestioning imitation of the expert by the novice. The student teachers’ imitation and direct modelling is damaging to the development of the teaching profession (Harrison, et al., 2005). Criticisms of the apprenticeship model also revolve around claims that it fails to give recognition to the existing skills and knowledge of the student teacher; it encourages deference to experience regardless of the quality of experience and it encourages student teachers to conform to existing school practices whilst prohibiting the development of new approaches and regeneration of the profession (Rippon and Martin, 2006; Tickle, 2000).

The term ‘cooperating teacher’ when used to mean a mentor has been described as undesirable in some settings (Awaya et al., 2003). It has been argued that the term assumes that student teachers’ placements in schools is often made arbitrarily based on considerations such as teaching specialization and availability of a suitable cooperating teacher at a school (Awaya et al., 2003). It implies the absence of appropriate criteria for matching student teachers with teachers and suggests, instead, that the school teacher is merely cooperating with the teacher education college and its requirements (Awaya et al., 2003). It is interesting to note that the term ‘cooperating teacher’ is popularly used in initial teacher education

programmes in Malawi. For example, the initial teacher education programme at the University of Malawi uses the term ‘cooperating teacher’ to mean a school teacher who is supposed to work or assist student teacher during teaching practice. The term was previously used at Masambiro College until ‘cooperating teachers’ were phased out (see Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine).

The relationship between a mentor and a student teacher should transform into emerging colleagueship (Spindler and Biott, 2000). This can be achieved by allowing the mentee to have an independent identity within the school and amongst other colleagues. Spindler and Biott (2000) describe successful examples of new student teacher mentoring that include the transition from a relationship of support and development to one which allows the student or novice teacher to contribute to a team, taking on specific responsibilities in a whole school setting and earning their identity. The mentor should be able to transcend the dominant practices of the school system and recognise good teaching in all its shapes and forms and should have enough confidence to allow the student teachers certain freedoms to evolve their own style and practices (Crasborn et al., 2007).

A study (Hobson, 2003) found ‘that the benefits and costs of mentoring experienced by participants in one field will not necessarily be the same as those experienced in another, especially since the nature of the mentoring strategies employed differs to take account of differences in context’ (p. 5). There is also research evidence that the culture inherent in a teacher education programme may also affect the content of mentor/mentee conversation (Wang et al., 2003). This may be quite important for initial teacher education in Malawi, where culture tends to have a significant role in the relationship between people in authority and those on professional courses. Feiman-Nemser (1996) draws attention to some vagueness or lack of purpose in some mentoring programmes.

Mentors also tend to have both a development and a judgmental role (Kullman, 1998). The developmental role entails assisting in the student teacher’s overall professional learning and development, and includes helping to plan the teaching the student teacher is to do at the school, and providing feedback after observation of lessons which are not assessed. The judgmental role, on the other hand, entails having sole responsibility for the overall assessment of a student teacher's teaching by means of a grading (Kullman, 1998). If student teachers feel that the mentor's role is solely judgmental there can be various consequences: student teachers may be afraid to enter into a constructive dialogue with mentors; they may be disinclined to express worries and concerns, to identify what they perceive as weaknesses

and to ask mentors for guidance to help them develop strategies to remedy such weaknesses; student teachers may concentrate on what they perceive to be their strengths throughout their teaching practice and avoid lesson types and activities which they feel less confident about (Awaya et al., 2003). This may have affects on their perceptions of mentors and how they develop in school settings.

Research by Evertson and Smithey (2001) showed that trained mentors demonstrated better conferencing skills, including more awareness of student teachers’ needs. They found that trained mentors guided their mentees more to use self-inquiry or self-discovery in reflecting on a lesson as opposed to evaluating or giving advice for improvement. Trained mentors also used more active listening skills as opposed to a passive listening and elicited more reflection through probing or using follow-up questions (Everton and Smithey, 2001). Timperley (2001) concluded that after training, mentors were able to improve the quality of their dialogues with their student teachers.

Research by Harrison et al., (2005) illustrated that mentor training that focuses on the processes concerned with the types of questioning by the mentor which enables the mentee to begin to open themselves up for scrutiny, can begin to create different ways of working. The mentee is then able to become autonomous in analysing situations arising in practice, and also in thinking of alternative ways of dealing with them. Edwards and Green (1999) concluded in a study that ‘cognitive coaching’ training can stimulate growth in the supervisory skills. However, not all mentors showed growth in their skills and neither did all the student teachers show growth in their level of reflection. This suggests that not all participants experience the same effects from mentoring training. This may be caused by the fact that the training content and approach is often the same for all participants, while their needs and skill level may possibly be different. There is also a potential influence of personal characteristics of mentors and student teachers in their different levels of growth (Holton and Baldwin, 2000).

An important aspect of an initial teacher education where mentoring is used is a collaborative partnership between schools and colleges of teacher education. Partnership is now the orthodoxy in terms of describing the appropriate relationship between schools and universities in initial teacher education (ITE) in United Kingdom. According to Wilson (2004) partnership models of training can help shift perspectives through mutual engagement in the exploration of possibilities. Working within a partnership has the potential, at the conscious level, for the student or beginning teachers to copy good practices and avoid bad

practices (Wilson, 2004). At a more subtle level, too, exposure to the unspoken classroom and school culture may shape student or beginning teachers’ beliefs and practices (Wilson, 2004). In this case, mentoring requires that schools and colleges are linked so that school teachers understand their mentoring roles within initial teacher education when student teachers are placed in their schools. The partnership model is also important because it spells out the type of training that school teachers are supposed to undergo to be effective mentors of student teachers. Graham (2006) noted that in England, schools involved in training teachers, as sites of guided clinical practice, have assumed more responsibility for the pre- service training of teachers. In the England scenario, the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) manages all courses of teacher education by regulating the curriculum as well as the collaboration between teacher education providers, designed training schools and mentors for the teacher education (Furlong, 2002).

In summary, the discussion based on the literature in this section shows that most programmes of initial teacher education in the developed world are relying on mentors to help the professional learning of student teachers during school-based teacher education. In Malawi, the conceptualisation of mentoring does not appear to adhere to how mentoring is used in the developed world. The benefits of mentoring student teachers are manifold and even though the role of ‘cooperating teacher’ was phased out at the research site of the current study (Masambiro College), the discussion in the section suggests that ‘cooperating teachers’ can play a significant role in initial teacher education. There would be need for ‘cooperating teachers’ to be appropriately trained for the role of mentoring so that they offer productive support for professional learning of student teachers. It would be necessary to ensure that student teachers receive appropriate support from school teachers if teaching practice is to remain one of the most important sources of effective professional learning in schools.