Mentor Match – Study on Relationship between Teaching Style of Practicum Mentor and Learning Style of Student-Teacher

• Main Authors: Hong-Lin Huang, 黃泓霖
• Other Authors: Wei-Yu Liu
• Format: Others
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/a2c4ee

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 課程設計與潛能開發學系 === 100 === Practicum is believed to be the crucial link within the entire teacher education system. During the course of developing their professional competence for education throughout practicum, the one-to-one mentoring model is used between student-teachers and their mentor-teachers. A lot of researches have pointed out that individual intrinsic qualities of both mentor-teachers and student-teachers do create impact upon the teaching/learning process as well as interactions, and further produce different results. A successful mentorship, on the one hand, produces a win-win outcome; a failed one, on the other hand, may bring significant harm to both parties. The mentoring practicum indeed provides student-teachers with a highly guided and developed environment; however, there are several essentials worthy of probing into. This study seeks to understand from the angle of teaching/learning styles how the guidance of mentor-teachers, the learning of student-teachers, and different styles affect the mentorship in terms of mentoring practicum. The relevance as well as context within has been analyzed to determine the impact of teaching/learning styles upon practicum. The objectives of this study are: 1. Identifying the teaching styles and guidance types of mentor-teachers 2. Probing into the learning styles and learning behaviors of student-teachers 3. Understanding how the combination of different teaching/learning styles affects the practicum progress, mentorship, and practicum outcome This study was conducted in the first semester of academic year 2010. Firstly, a teaching-learning style scale was distributed to eight groups of mentor-teachers and student-teachers. Secondly, judgment sampling was adopted to choose four groups showing distinct styles but with different style combinations. Finally, certain qualitative research methods including interviews, observations, documental analysis, etc. were employed to collect as well as analyze data. The result shows that mentor-teachers do provide different guidance types due to different teaching styles; student-teachers also preferred learning behaviors as well due to different learning styles. As far as style combinations are concerned, the delegator/self-expressive combination, and the facilitator/interpersonal combination lead to a satisfactory practicum by creating a positive teaching/learning cycle between mentor-teachers and student-teachers. However, the delegator/interpersonal combination produces poor results, even problems, in all three aspects, practicum progress, mentorship, and practicum outcome, due to significant differences between the styles of both parties. In light of that, this study concludes that both mentor-teachers and student-teachers have their own teaching/learning styles, and those styles affect the practicum rather significantly.