The role of the mentor teacher in the students’ final works and students’ views on his or her mentoring work Majda Cencič
Summary: In the process of mentoring students’ final works the mentor assumes a variety of roles – from an expert to a role model for the student. We were interested in determining what the assessment of some roles were by a casual sample of first year master’s students in two different study programmes of a faculty of education in Slovenia, who had already acquired experience of working with a mentor in their undergraduate studies. The descriptive statistics has shown that students assign the highest ratings to the mentor in the role of an expert in a definite area and to the mentor in the role of assessor and adviser. Also other roles listed in the paper have received a high average of scores, above the median value of 3 on the five-point numerical rating scale. The differences between the study groups in the assessments of individual roles were not statistically significant. With the dendrogram three interesting groups of mergers of roles were obtained that have been labelled as: professional, pedagogical, and supportive. The results have been illustrated with the records of one of the groups of first year master’s students, who wrote a non-structured text about their mentor for the final work in the context of the first-degree study. The analysis has revealed the students either praised their mentors or criticised them, stated the expectations they had, the advices and highlighted personality characteristics. Based on the outcomes we have tried to portray a good mentor from the point of view of students.