e mentoring as a tool muzaffer cetin

E-mentoring as a Professional Teacher Development tool

Muzaffer ÇETİN English Language Instructor - International Antalya Universitymuzaffercetin77@gmail.com

Problem Statement The teachers at state schools need

immediate responses for their instant challenges.

Overcoming difficulties of EFL teachers with supplemental support apart from their ongoing professional development activities in their areas.

Can e-mentoring be used as a developmental tool to complete the gap via supporting teachers online?

Purpose of the study The aim of the research is mainly two-

folds. The first aim is to identify the needs of English language teachers considering their professional development related to FA practices.

The second one deals with the effectiveness of collaborative e-mentoring platform as a supplemental tool for professional teacher development.

Method and Research Instruments  At the first phase, data was collected

from an online questionnaire identifies Formative Assessment needs. The first section of the survey consisted of demographic information and details about school they work, during their pre-service or in-service training whether they have learned something about FA (Theory or Practice)

. The second section of the survey was adapted from the book “Exploring Formative Assessment. The Professional Learning Community Series” by Brookhart published in 2009. The aim was to understand the overall needs of the participants related to FA.

The second phase was the implementation process

An action research mode was applied. For an e-mentoring project like this, Single and Single’s e-mentoring model could be adapted (Single and Single, 2005).

Single&Single model of e-mentoring including three phases: planning, program structure, and assessment. Implementation process focuses on how to provide EFL teachers with an online collaborative program for the use of FA.

The participants’ written and oral documents through various instruments: e-mails, interviews, Skype audio records, chat records and records from the platform: Mentor-mentee one to one records and all accessible records, reflection reports. *reflective journal where the e-mentoring process and results were reported.

Findings and results

As the first step of our action plan, we determined the topics for the modules to be used in our e-mentoring program.

Our personal contacts with Laura Greenstein and Dylan Wiliam and the book “Exploring Formative Assessment: The Professional Learning Community Series” by Brookhart (2009) helped us prepare the titles and the contents of the modules.

Modules Using formative assessment in my regular

classroom practice Setting and sharing goals for students’ learning Eliciting/listening to students Asking questions to encourage students to think Providing effective feedback on student work Encouraging students to use self-assessment and

peer assessment Using formative assessment information in

instructional planning Role of digital technologies for FA

We decided to use the modules that would meet the participants’ needs. Subsequently, we implemented the modules, and collected and analyzed the data that we received from various sources within the process of our action research.

We based our analysis on two basic themes:

* “what were the challenges and why? ” * “what worked”.

What were the challenges and why?

This part is dedicated to analyze the main challenges that were met during the study. They are expected to light the way for further studies on online teacher professional development.

Three main sub-groups challenging factors about the structure

and organization of the study challenging internal factors of

participants’ active participation, challenging external factors of

participants’ active participation.

What worked?

Nearly all of the teachers stated that they were satisfied with the study in varying levels.

Three areas (worked well) awareness of the content knowledge, application, virtual sharing.

Conclusions & recommendations

the study revealed that most of the teachers believed in the importance of having professional development support through e-mentoring

Conclusion It could break down the locational

barriers between teachers from various schools by using an effective tool for teacher development support.

 EFL teachers who voluntarily work in collaboration with other teachers have improved their FA strategies through e-mentoring support.

Recommendations the inability of teachers to meet

simultaneously or to arrange their schedule to work consistently- it still has implications for broader expressions for professional development.

e-mentoring may not be difficult to be accepted and practiced in Turkey context

In order to incorporate new developments into EFL in a more practical and feasible way, the need for online teacher development e-mentoring platforms arises. It is crucial to increase the variety of in-service training programs that may keep language teachers on track of development in their field.

Thanks for listening to me.Muzaffer Çetin

For further questions and cooperation

muzaffercetin77@gmail.comSkype: smilingodessa