Competing practice-based mentoring frameworks for student-teachers: between quasi-residency and expedited alternative teacher preparation

At their best, teacher preparation programmes harness the power of mentoring to provide professional, emotional, and organisational support for novice teachers and student-teachers. While teacher mentoring research provides much information regarding effective practices, little is known about how different preparation tracks structure the mentoring they provide. Based on interviews with student-teachers (n = 24), this paper examines and compares the mentoring experiences of students in two different, highly reputed Israeli teacher preparation tracks; Academia-Classroom and Hotam. The analysis focuses on emerging similarities and differences between the tracks, indicating two structural aspects associated with the intensity of mentoring–the division of mentors’ roles and co-teaching–that hindered or supported the quality of student-teachers’ mentoring experience. It exemplifies that, despite the importance of individual agency and interpretation, structural programmatic features are key factors in shaping teacher preparation processes and outcomes.