The Development of Coaching and Mentoring Model to Enhance Pre-service Teachers’ Competency in Conducting Science Classroom Action Research

Abstract

         Classroom action research (CAR) has been considered a critical part of teacher preparation standards. This research and development design under the interpretive paradigm aimed to 1) develop the coaching and mentoring model that promotes pre-service teachers’ CAR competency, and 2) study the effectiveness of the model. The participants consisted of twenty-three fifth-year pre-service teachers and eight university lecturers in the first phase and three pre-service teachers in the second phase. Data were collected from the semi-structured interviews, the CAR’s understanding and ability test, the Presentation and writing of the research proposal evaluation form, Document analysis, and the researcher. The data were analyzed through an inductive process and descriptive statistics. The findings revealed that 1) the coaching and mentoring model consisted of three tenets including preparation, following up and support, and sharing and exchange. The guiding principles of the model were (1) encountering classroom problems, (2) face-to-face meetings, (3) immediately supporting, (4) showing a good example, and (5) sharing the research finding. 2) the most pre-service teachers gained more CAR competency. The in-depth study revealed that the three teachers developed their competency in each component at a moderate level. Even though they understood more about CAR, all of them were vague in its feature. For the conducting CAR and presentation tenet, they developed their ability to an excellent level. It could be concluded that the coaching and mentoring model that promotes pre-service teachers’ CAR competency had the potential to enhance pre-service science teachers’ competency.