Welcome to your Community of Practice
The aim of the Mentor Zone is to provide a centralised resource of support for mentors, within our Community of Practice, to assist in the delivery of clear, consistent and effective training and mentoring across the university and school placement settings to ensure each trainee receives the highest quality training.
This year, the Exeter Model of Initial Teacher Education has once again been updated and strengthened, taking into account the up-to-date research and government guidance. We strive to ensure that our Lead Mentors and mentor teams have a ‘deep knowledge of the training curriculum and its application in the teaching of specific subjects’ (DfE, 2021: 11). We undertake training at key times of the academic year and begin by establishing a ’community of practice’ (Lave, 1991, Lave and Wenger, 1998) with induction training in the autumn term, followed by further training in the spring and summer terms. Our ‘community of practice’, surrounding teacher education, aims to socially learn from each other’s expertise as expert practitioners, educational researchers and academics to provide the best teacher education for our trainees.
In the Exeter Model, mentoring resides in the complementary roles of several tutors within the clearly defined model of trainee learning. Each of these, the ITE Coordinator (ITEC), Reflective Mentor, Lead Mentor, Personal Tutor and the University Visiting Tutor, has a different role to play in supporting the trainees. In partnership with the university, the ITEC has a key role in quality assuring mentor recruitment, engagement, impact and development.
Please continue to refer the Mentor Zone for practical support to complement the synchronous sessions that are delivered throughout the year. The Mentor Zone will continue to develop over time and we will be working with mentors to discuss evaluations and deliver timely and effective feedback to plan for improvement and to measure the impact of initiatives.