School Experience: Institutions’ Expectations from Pre-service Teachers

ABSTRACT This paper examines the expectation of the institution on the pre-teachers during teaching practice. It emphasises that becoming a teacher is a process that involves training through mentorship. The study also provides information on the imperative areas of mentoring in order to have an effective teaching and learning during school experience, these area includes preparation of lesson plan, presentation of the lesson, assessment of students outcome, classroom management, maintenance of discipline, understanding administrative procedure, developing professionalism, modelling, feedback to the students, pre-teachers and their subject mastery, involvement in extracurricular activities. The study concludes that the school experience exercise centered on the students is an important component of the teacher education curriculum because it prepares the pre-teacher to become not only a teacher but eventually becoming a mentor. It recommends that institutions should give proper and adequate attention to school experience so that institutions will rely on such experiences as the adequate criteria necessary to be certified as teacher in the chosen field or course of study.