Secondary school teachers and their academic trainingthe opinion of its protagonists

Resumo

Portrayal of the training of teachers from their point of view, as protagonists of the teaching and mentoring action. This study was posed in the context of creating an assessing scale focused on secondary teachers to determine their knowledge and opinion about their teaching and mentoring tasks. It encompassed two phases; A qualitative one, where a focus group formed by secondary teachers, school counsellors and scholars, advised the researchers on the items and variables contained in the scale. The second, a quantitative exploration, where the resulting Likert-type scale was tested through a 125 sample of secondary teachers extracted from private, charter and public schools from Spain. Results show how although 48% of the sample have received 100 hours plus of continuous training in the last 6 years, and 37% of them received specific training on their mentoring role, less than 75% of the sample consider their mentoring actions at school as “good” or “very good” and less than 32% of teachers consider their counselling practices good or very good. However, 90% of the teachers polled consider the teaching of their subjects in the same positive categories. That is a significant difference to keep in mind while designing new training projects for secondary teachers, since both mentoring and counselling roles are an essential part of their assignments. Other substantial variables such as the importance given by teachers to the cooperation between different education departments or their satisfaction with their mentoring role are studied as well.