'I owe to my tutor much of my professional development': looking at the benefits of tutoring as perceived by the tutees

The context of the present paper is a school of professional development for teacher educators. One of the school's unique features is the employment of tutors/ mentors, who are colleagues of their tutees in different study programmes. It has been established that many teacher educators enter the profession 'accidentally', whether from school teaching or from academia, without any prior training. Therefore, they require lengthy periods of time to consolidate their new professional identity. This paper presents a model of professional development that involves tutoring/mentoring, and focuses on the interaction between tutor and tutee as perceived by the tutees. There are four tutors assigned to each of the two-year specialization programmes offered at the school. All of them are staff members from various teacher training colleges. The research reported employed a mixed-methods design methodology comprising a questionnaire that was drafted especially for this research and was based on semi-structured interviews and pilot sampling. Six graduates were interviewed and 231 (out of the 500) graduates responded to the questionnaire. They were asked about the required properties of a tutor and about the elements they perceived to be most beneficial to the tutees' professional development. The findings point to the benefits of tutoring. The terms 'tutor' and 'mentor' are used in this paper interchangeably.