Research On Team Building Of Mentors In Practice Bases For Master Of Education

Full-time Master of Education as a new academic degree has begun admitting students since2009. The advantage of professional degree education is its practice-orientedness, and therefore, universities with a Master of Education program must value student’s teaching practice and construct excellent practice bases out of university campus. The mentors in practice bases are the key factor for the quality of student’s teaching practice. With themselves as an example, they enlighten the teachers-to-be with their words and behaviors. However, take ECNU for instance, the team building of mentors in practice bases faces a series of problems.A combination of research methods including literature review, survey and case study have been adopted by this research. The result of questionnaires and interviews about mentors team-building in practice bases indicates that although progress has been made three main problems do exist, namely, low control on mentor-selection, insufficient training and low efficiency of incentive measures. The fundamental reasons behind are inadequate understanding of the importance of the team-building of mentors in practice bases, lack of a detailed policy and limited cooperation between university and practice bases.In order to build up a stable, professional, and sustainable mentor team, this paper, with a reference to modern human resources management methods, proposes three tentative suggestions:Firstly, both universities and practice bases should value the importance of team building of mentors in practice bases; Secondly, a coordinating mechanism between universities and practice bases should be improved, meanwhile a complementary "Center-Schools" mechanism within a university should be constructed as well, so that Management Center of Professional Degrees of Education and all schools and departments can work together for better communications with headmasters and mentors in practice bases; Thirdly, in order to promote team building of mentors, the selecting criteria and procedures, the training system and an evaluation and incentive mechanism should be established and improved.