Abstract:

Mentors, that is, experienced teachers who provide support to their novice colleagues can make a strong impact on their first steps in the teaching profession. However, there are no directions set by the ministry of education or other authorities saying in detail what the work of mentors should be. Therefore, an international project titled “Mentor Training. Materials and Tasks” was highly needed in this field. The project is headed by Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovak Republic (UKF, SK), and five other universities from four countries participate: J. Selye University, Komarno (UKo, SK), Slovak Republic, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic (UO, CR), University of Economics and Business, Prague, Czech Republic (UEB, CR), Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary (EKU, HU), University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia (UNS, RS).

The project aims to:
(a) support the professionalism of mentors and equip them with appropriate mentoring knowledge and skills;
(b) develop innovative modular curricula and training materials for further education and continuous professional development of mentors;
(c) design a further education course for the face-to-face as well as self-study of mentors, which will be submitted for accreditation in each partner country.

The training materials and tasks are collected within the project and published in the form of a textbook in English and in each partner´s mother tongue (Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Serbian). Then, they are disseminated and exploited for the training of (prospective) mentors in each country.

Before that, several project meetings were held that focused on mentor training. Selected activities from the training materials were introduced to the project participants from the partner countries there. In total, 29 of the project participants, who formed six groups according to their home institution, played the role of mentees, and two participants managed the activity, that is, they were in the role of mentors. The activity focused on areas of mentor competence. The mentees' task was to select five areas of mentor competence from the given list of 15, consider them from the view of importance, and range from five to one (five-point score for the most important competence). Then, the list of “top five” areas is defined by each group of mentees, which was the main objective of this research. We expected that the mentees would emphasize professional knowledge and skills, skills towards managing conflicts, willingness to share experience and knowledge, confidentiality, and providing active and constructive feedback.

The collected data were considered from three criteria:
(1) total score;
(2) occurrence of the areas in groups;
(3) combinations of the areas in groups.

The results showed that providing active and constructive feedback reached the highest total score and occurrence in groups. However, the authors' institution gave it the lowest score compared to others that scored it highest (5 points 5) or very high (4 points 5).

Keywords:

Mentor, mentee, competence, novice teacher.