Strength-Based Mentoring in Pre-service Teacher Education: A Literature Review

Source: Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, Volume 17, Issue 3 August 2009 , pages 263 - 275.

In order to better prepare pre-service teachers for potential challenges in their first year of teaching, it is critical that both teacher educators and supervising teachers provide strategies to strengthen pre-service teachers' beliefs and maintain their motivation.

In this article, strengths-based theories are reviewed to provide a discussion on teacher mentoring approaches that offer an alternative to the more common problem-based models.

A strength-based mentoring model in teacher education is presented. Furthermore, measures and strategies developed from different strength-based theories are applied to the six elements of this model.