Experiential Learning in Initial Teacher Education: Do Schools have Mentoring Capacity?

This paper focuses on experiential learning of student teachers and the perceived capacity of mentoring schools. Experiential learning in initial teacher education requires mentoring schools to provide a learning environment in order to equip student teachers with both subject content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. However, the crisis in the South African education system lies in a lack of the development of professional skills of teachers, in addition to insecure classroom competence. The prevailing low quality of education has to dramatically change through a well-equipped initial teacher training programme that produces an adequate number of competent teachers. To understand and curb challenges emanating from practice teaching, large scale research is needed to explore the relationship between experiential learning and mentoring schools. The question raised is how to engender in schools a sense of caring and responsibility towards student teachers. In order to respond to this question, I critically analyse the literature on experiential learning in initial teacher training. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p53