Teacher Motivation and Aspiration for Online Mentoring their Fellow Teachers in the COVID Lockdown Period

As Continuous Professional Development (CPD) moves to embrace ICTs to improve equity, scale, and quality, there is a need for experienced and motivated mentors to offer online support to teachers. The purpose of the study is to understand the motivation and aspiration of teachers as mentors, and their adaptation of past F2F mentoring experience to support mentoring in an online mode in the COVID period. The study is based on a CPD programme started in 2017, offered by a university in India for 68 government/public secondary school teachers in rural districts of two Eastern Indian states. In January 2021, during the COVID period about 10 of these 68 teachers joined the university team to mentor 500 teachers taking online courses leading to digital badges. The state appreciates the contribution of these teachers turned mentors but there is no formal recognition or career progression plan for them. The findings of this study suggest that teacher mentors are valuable to scale quality professional development in technology integration, and there is a need for building their capacities and recognizing them in the system as mentors