PROMENTORS – Promoting Mentors' Work in Education

Experts in the field of Education agree, that having an effective mentor significantly reduces the likelihood of beginning teachers (BTs) leaving the profession and improve their teaching capabilities. Mentoring is the most important component to bridge BT to school work and as such should be seen as a profession that needs to be trained for, especially in a diverse and complex educational system such as the Israeli one. However, the mentoring process in Israel is often not clear, mentor training is insufficient and so are the number of hours allocated for this important task.

Recently, the conventional one-to-one mentoring approach has been increasingly replaced by alternative mentoring models. One such model is the Finnish PGM (Peer Group Mentoring), where teachers listen to each other, share ideas, and learn from each other. The goal of PROMENTORS is to explore similar ways to select, train and assist mentors’ work in schools from induction onward, while implementing innovative mentoring models in the Israeli system.

This project is a continuation of a previous EU project –PROTEACH (project No.573877), where an innovative model of BT induction was developed and implemented – the MIT (Multiplayer Induction Teams). The MIT model is based on a partnership between the academia, the school and related policymakers (from the municipalities and the ministry of education). The MIT model has proved to be very successful for teachers retention in the schools participating in the pilots, as well as its impact on the partnership between schools and HEIs during induction and as such influences HEIs to expand its intervention in schools and strengthening its contacts with the schools’ staff and policies.

The PROMENTORS project aim is to expand the successful MIT model to serve as a basis for a new model of mentors’ training carried by the academia in Israel. In the new mentoring model, we will strengthen the MIT model to be a bachelor and MA accredited courses, where mentors, BT, pedagogical guides, accompanying teachers together with the school staff, will work together for maintaining mentors professional development. Thus, we hope to improve the quality of teacher training in Israel through an efficient and sustainable mentoring system based on best EU practices with their mentees.

PROMENTORS is an EU Erasmus+ project, led by Talpiot College in Holon, with the participation of overall 14 academic institutions in Israel and Europe. Beit Berl College is one of the partner organizations and co-leaders (together with Levinsky College) of Work Package 2 – Development.

The project’s team co-leaders and main researchers at Beit-Berl College are: