Scholarly record

MENTORSHIP IN EDUCATION - DIMENSIONS OF QUALITY ASSURANCE

Ioana Porumb, Sorina Chircu

Abstract

The quality of a training program can be identified both through its process of implementation and later through the actual activity of the trainee. During February-December 2013 the strategic project named “From start to success – national mentorship program for the professional insertion of teachers”, financed by the social European fund, was implemented. The program’s aim was to improve the professional insertion and the activity growth of junior teachers from the secondary education system through the development of a national formal system of traineeship assistance that is coherent, cohesive and sustainable. The project aimed to also use the experience potential of teachers with experience in the system, thus growing the attractiveness of the teaching career through mentorship support activities. The present papers aims to measure the degree in which the quality of the professional insertion mentorship program was assured, through the analysis of two essential dimensions which are the internal coherence of the program and its reflexive dimension. The present paper aims to measure the degree to which the quality of the professional insertion mentorship program was assured, by analyzing a few essential dimensions of this program which are: To what degree was an external coherence of the program assured? What about its rigorous character? To what degree are we speaking about a qualitative curricular design of this very important program for the implementation and strengthening of mentorship in the Romanian undergraduate education system? The degree of external coherence of the mentorship program results from the measure to which it respects national and European legislative measures, being in accordance with the medium term strategies of developing learning and education in Romania. The rigorous character of the program results from the measure to which it has allowed mentor trainees the development of a high level of understanding processes specific to the educational environment and field in general and to a higher level of understanding specific mentorship processes, in particular. The quality of curricular design results from the measure in which the program is based on a realistic, logic and coherent strategic conception. As research methods we have used document analysis and survey-based research. The survey is formed of 181 people, teachers from the secondary education system, trained in the program in order to obtain the mentor status, from two training centers of the eight centers selected to participate to the training: Bucharest, Iasi, Pitesti and Drobeta Turnu Severin. The data processing was done with the help of the IBM SPSS software package. The results obtained after processing the data from the three above-mentioned dimensions, show a high level of quality of the national mentorship program.

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