Abstract:
During Work Integrated Learning, pre-service mentoring helps to prepare final-year
education students for the workplace. For the purpose of this study, seven pre-service
teachers and their mentor teachers formed scholarly communities of practice. Selfregulated
professionalism was initiated by implementing the principles of self-regulated
learning using a constructivist Whole Brain® Thinking mix as epistemological grounding.
Participatory action research was enriched and a Whole Brain® Participatory Action
Research Design was used to contribute to the scholarship of mentoring in the
education context and the new meaning-making of our current understanding of what
action research entails.
A baseline study was conducted ten months prior to the commencement of the Whole
Brain® Participatory Action Research study. The responses from the Senior and FET
Phase pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers in the two online surveys
provided an information base for the participatory action research process.
The rationale for using Whole Brain® Participatory Action Research was that no
scholars have examined a collaborative perspective on pre-teachers, mentor teachers
and a university faculty. This particular research design has never before been used in
the context of pre-service teacher education. The Herrmann Brain Dominance
Instrument® was initially completed by the participants and myself as the principal
researcher to inform reflective practice and to create awareness of our thinking
preferences. Action research was conducted by the pre-service teachers in their
classroom practice and executed by the mentor teachers in their mentorship practice. I
employed action research during the scholarly communities of practice sessions with
the participants. Peer mentoring, Whole Brain® Mentoring and blended mentoring were
innovatively introduced in the mentor teachers’ and my own mentoring practice as an
essential part of the self and the we becoming agent(s) of transformation. The
development of a Comprehensive Whole Brain® Mentoring Model for the education
context is shared as an outcome of this study.
