Rock, Brian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6868-3940 and Collins, Jane (2025) An Evaluation of the YSJ ITE Partnership Mentor Training and Professional Development Programme: Promoting mentor autonomy, critically and professional agency. In: UCET Annual Conference 2025, 11-12 November 2025, Leeds. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This workshop explores the role of mentor training in fostering inquiring minds within initial teacher education, focusing on findings from a recent survey conducted with general mentors who completed the York St John University Mentor Training Programme (2024-25). In response to DfE (2021) guidelines, the programme introduced 20 hours of structured training designed to ensure mentors develop a robust understanding of student teachers' ITE curriculum. The programme encouraged mentors to critically engage with educational theories due to the divide between theory and school-based practice (Grossman et al., 2018), while also empowering mentors to reflect on the limitations of the evidence base embedded within the CCF (2019). Through the survey, mentors reported on both the affordances and challenges of this enhanced training. Findings reveal varied experiences in relation to how effectively the training supported mentors in adopting a more critically reflective, research-informed stance, and how prepared they felt to foster similar dispositions in their mentees. The workshop will share these findings and provide a platform to discuss how mentor training programmes can better support inquiring professionalism. At a time when ITE policy reform is increasingly shaped by neoliberal imperatives (Ellis, 2023), it is vital that mentors are equipped to resist reductive, compliance-driven approaches that result in what Holdern and Brooks (2023) define as “instrumental trainability”. Instead, we advocate for a model of mentorship that promotes autonomy, criticality, and agency. The workshop will invite participants to co-construct strategies for embedding this ethos in mentor training, ensuring student teachers are prepared to enter the profession as reflective, adaptive professionals.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Other)
Status:	Unpublished
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary Education L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/14703

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