The survey of junior high school PE teachers as mentor teachers in Taipei city

[[abstract]]This study aimed to (1) understand the current situation of middle school PE teachers in Taipei City as mentor teachers, (2) analyze the factors that affect PE teachers to be willing to become mentor teachers, (3) explore whether PE teachers’ background influences their willingness to become mentor teachers. The study used questionnaire as method. Furthermore, it used stratified sampling from 209 Junior high school PE teachers in 31 schools, and in 12 administration were as in Taipei City. The results of this study were as follows: 1. The current situation (1) In general, PE mentor teachers promote student teachers’ professional abilities through sharing and discussing their past experiences. Therefore, they have above average confidence in their student teachers. However, more research should be done about whether the mentor teachers’ self-consciousness matches with their abilities of supervising. (2) There were no real rewarding methods to award mentor teachers nowadays, only by oral praises or certificates of appreciation. Nevertheless, PE mentor teachers would anticipate to be awarded by “reducing classes”, which can also compensate the time they spend on interacting with student teachers. 2. Factors (1) In the process of supervising, it not only promoted professional development but also increased the sense of achievement. In addition, mentor teachers recognize the importance of student teaching. These are invisible rewards to mentor teachers. (2) The reasons that PE teachers didnot like to be mentor teachers were: (1) no real rewards as incentives (2) playing many roles at school. They had their hands full with work, so they did not have time and energy to be mentor teachers. Furthermore, student teachers’ motivations to learn are not high, which affects PE teachers’ willingness to become mentor teachers. 3. PE teachers who had experiences of being mentor teachers could apply the past supervising experiences to new student teachers. Therefore, there was a low correlation between experiences of being mentor teacher and the willingness to be mentor teachers.