Generic and specific competences of the mentor teacher: higher education students perception in the health area

Abstract

Introduction: The mentoring process is dynamic, reciprocal and reflexive, hence skills as a disposition to act in a relevant way in relation to a specific situation (Le Boterf, 2003), need to be evaluated in the mentoring processes. The mentor refers to a more experienced professional who guides, teaches, directs, supports and advises a student with less practice, playing an important role on a personal and professional level (Botti & Rego, 2007).  Objetive: To evaluate the perception of the college students about the supervisory skills that need to be obtained by the mentor teacher. Methods: The cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out on a sample of 306 college students of the health area, of a polytechnic, with an average age of 21.15 years and a higher percentage of women (81.7%). The gathering of Information was supported by the application of Generic, specific and meta-competences of the supervisor scale (Cunha, Cruz, Menezes & Albuquerque, 2017) and Supervisor Core competencies scale (Cunha & Albuquerque, 2017), available online in the academic institution site.  Results: The study allows us to conclude that the most important characteristics necessary for the mentor teacher, for college students, are the supervisor's generic skills (average = 4.36 and SD = 0.47), and personal factors (averagde = 4.83 and SD = 0.46). The supervisor's core competencies predicts the supervisor's generic, specific and meta-competencies skills, explaining their 70% variation. The results support the importance of the assignment of a mentor teacher in college (87.5%), and the monitoring should be effective from the 1st to the 3rd / 4th year (60.4%). They also suggest the preference of daily sessions (51.6%) in the training place (52.4%), lasting less than one hour (49.7%). Conclusions: The importance of monitoring the pedagogical competences of supervision and mentoring emerges from the study and the results suggest that the students of higher education value the existence of a mentor teacher, so their attribution is pertinent to consolidate the mission all dimensions of pedagogical action.