THE IMPACT OF INDIVIDUAL STUDENT MENTORING FOR TEACHER PROFESSIONALISM IN ENGLISH PRE-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION

Mentoring in pre-service education is a key success factor, because not only can it transform the pre-service teacher as the mentee, but also develop the mentor teacher professionally. This preliminary study to find the impact of individual student mentoring was inspired by the awareness of its potential multidimensional impact for teacher professionalism. Two research questions guided this study. The first question is to find out the impact of this individual student mentoring from the student mentee’s point of view in terms of four dimensions, namely: psychological or emotional support, support for setting goals and choosing a career, academic support, and a role model. The second research question explores how this kind of mentoring developed the mentor teacher professionally. Data were collected from the students in the form of questionnaire and written reflection, and from the mentor teacher in the form of written reflection. Data were analyzed separately to attend to each research question. The findings show that the pre-service students experienced the four dimensions in their individual mentoring, while the mentor teacher developed herself professionally in three areas, which were interactional skills, self-awareness, and attitude. The implication of the findings is discussed at the end.


Mentoring: Definitions, characteristics, and value
Mentoring is not new. The term 'mentoring' itself is derived from ancient Greek, and refers to Odysseus's counselor and advisor who took care and educated his son, Telemachus (Dutton, order to provide psychological and moral support, it is important that mentoring is conducted in a safe environment as perceived by the student or mentee. Second, to provide support for setting goals and choosing a career path, mentoring should include assessment of student's strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and interests as well as identify the needed assistance with setting academic or career goals and decision making. Third, academic subject knowledge support aimed at advancing a student's knowledge refers to helping the student acquire necessary skills and knowledge through educating, evaluating, as well as challenging the student academically. Lastly, providing a role model includes-on one hand-the mentor's willingness and capability in sharing or self-disclosing past and present life experiences, struggles, and feelings so as to personalize and enrich the mentor-student relationship. On the other hand, specification of a role model also partly depends on the student's ability to learn from the mentor's past and present life, achievements and failures. Furthermore, several additional suggestions from other researchers were also shared by Nora and Crisp (2007) on what is required from a mentor to accomplish the second construct: (a) in-depth exploration and review of student's interests, abilities, ideas, and beliefs; (b) stimulation of critical thinking related to the student's future and developing his/her personal and professional potential; (c) a reflective process; (d) requesting detailed information and offering specific suggestions concerning the student's current plans and progress in achieving personal, educational, and career goals; (e) a respectful demand of explanations for the student's specific decisions or avoidance of decisions and actions which are relevant to an adult learner; and (f) facilitation in realizing the student's dream. While definitions about mentoring vary to some degree, it is evident that the essential value of mentoring has been accepted in the literature as well as in practice (Cohen, 1993in Crisp & Cruz, 2009). In the context of higher education, mentoring is claimed to be effective among others for student retention and enhanced learning strategy for undergraduate education (Mee-Lee & Bush, 2003), in retaining undergraduate students' persistence in learning and in maintaining their high grade point average (Crisp & Cruz, 2009), as well as academic success in general (Campbell et al., 2012). Mentoring, furthermore, provides trust, encouragement, nurture, support, as well as challenges to enable even high achieving students to thrive (Freeman, 1999). Mentoring is also connected to leadership as mentoring relationship has the potential to influence the mentee's leadership capacity (Campbell et al., 2012). In student teacher education, or better stated, in educating pre-service teachers-on which this article focuses-mentoring is definitely a very important success factor. It is an essential component in improving pre-service teachers' competence to deal with academic and social issues that they may need to face during their initial college education, as well as to improve their competence in teaching (Matsko et al., 2020;Orland-Barak & Wang, 2020;Richards, 2008;Wexler, 2019). Mentoring can also have a very influential impact to vocational discernment (Campbell et al., 2012;Wexler, 2019), which is very much related to the effectiveness of the curriculum of a pre-service teacher educational institution. In fact, mentoring should be integrated into our approach to teaching and professionalism (Fullan et al., 2010) because mentoring relationships between mentor teachers and student teachers are highly capable of transforming all the teachers involved (Izadinia, 2015). This latter fact, especially, is very astounding since mentoring affects not only the mentees, but also the mentors. If so is the case, mentoring, when applied in such a way, is also a strategic means of teacher professional development.

Teacher professional development
What areas can teachers develop in themselves? How do teachers develop? These two questions Mega Wati are attended to in Freeman's descriptive model (Foord, 2009). There are four areas that teachers can develop, which are skills, knowledge, awareness, and attitude. Teachers can develop themselves in seven different ways, called models, in accordance with who he/she is. The seven models are (1) the blank slate or deficit model, in which the teacher learns from instructions; (2) the science model, learning from research; (3) the theory-philosophy model, learning from ideas; (4) the art-craft model, learning intuitively; (5) reflective teaching model, learning from analysing your own teaching; (6) teacher learning as personal construction model, learning as an adult using the constructivism perspective from self-monitoring, from being observed, or from helping peer teachers; and (7) using role models, learning from an inspirational example. This paper takes the position that mentoring can facilitate a mentor teacher to develop his/her awareness and attitude towards teaching, learning, the students, themselves, or their culture, as Foord (2009) suggested for professional development. There is another point of view on what works for teacher professional development. When teacher professionalism depends on the initiative of the teacher him/herself, one can practice what is called independent professionalism (Richards, 2008). In doing so, the teacher engages in reflection and critical review on own views of teaching, values and beliefs; practices self-monitoring; analyses critical incidents; changes ideas within teacher support groups; or does action research. When this independent professionalism concept and Fullan's descriptive model are compared and contrasted, it is found that Freeman's blank slate or deficit model does not explicitly belong to this independent professionalism concept-except when the learning from instruction is initiated by the teacher him/herself. The other teacher professional development models above are more aligned with this independent professionalism concept. As far as pre-service teacher education is concerned, mentoring is also viewed as a way to foster pre-service teacher professional development (Mena et al., 2015). Research shows several arguments in this matter that became the inspiration for this study. First, that psychological and emotional support in mentoring is important for pre-service teacher's professional growth and development of positive self-image as future teachers (Orland-Barak & Wang, 2020). Second, mentoring is a way of preparing (pre-service) teachers to become effective agents who are not only committed to making difference in young people's lives but also skilled at pedagogical and partnership developments so that in turn success with students is made possible when they become teachers themselves (Fullan et al., 2010).

Mentoring in reality
In reality, the implementation of mentoring has often been disappointing (Fullan et al., 2010). Research has been reporting the issues that make good mentoring not easy to accomplish, such as how to select committed mentors who understand their roles, how to assign which mentors to match to which mentees, how formal or informal the mentor-mentee relationship should be, how to reward mentors for their contribution, and how to find the time for mentoring (Little, 1990in Fullan et al., 2010. Other research (Jacobi, 1991in Nora & Crisp, 2007 shared how colleges and universities implement mentoring in various ways, ranging from providing formal training for mentors-which implies that mentoring is taken seriously, to simply providing general guidelines for meeting times, locations and frequency of interactions. Another identified potential problem is the possible hierarchical relationship between mentor teacher and student, especially in a school-based practicum in pre-service teacher education where the mentor has a dual role as a mentor as well as a supervisor (Kuswandono, 2017). Publications about mentoring in pre-service teacher education in Indonesia usually reveal the cases where mentoring to students is implemented for the sake of a very specific purpose like completing a certain task, school-based practicum, micro teaching, or teaching practicum (Kuswandono, 2014;Kuswandono, 2017;Perry et al., 2007;Sulistiyo et al., 2017;Timperley, 2001). Therefore, it is inferred that mentoring is structurally implemented only for and during a certain period of time. This preliminary study is inspired by the awareness of the potential multidimensional impact of mentoring for both the mentor and students if mentoring is implemented in such a way on more or less permanent basis (Izadinia, 2015;Kuswandono, 2017;Nora & Crisp, 2007;Richards, 2008;Wexler, 2019). This study argues that individual student mentoring in a pre-service teacher education by a mentor teacher can have impact for both involved parties' teaching professionalism. Therefore, two research questions guided this study. The first question is to find out the impact of this individual student mentoring from the student's point of view in terms of the four dimensions according to Nora & Crisp (2007), namely: psychological or emotional support, support for goal setting and choosing a career, academic support for their successful study, and specification of a role model. The second research question explores how this kind of mentoring has developed the mentor professionally. It is hoped that the findings of this small-scaled study can provide some valuable feedback. For an English pre-service teacher education department-such as the one where this study is conducted-the findings can be used to review the present policy and process of mentoring and direct the future strategic policy of using it for teacher professionalism and comprehensive pre-service teacher education by making mentoring an integral part of curriculum and campus-based program (Fullan et al., 2010;Mee-Lee & Bush, 2003;Richards, 2008). As far as the pre-service teachers are concerned, it is hoped that the experience of having individual mentoring with a mentor teacher will in turn empower the mentees to become able teachers in their profession (Fullan et al., 2010;Mena et al., 2015;Orland-Barak & Wang, 2020;Wexler, 2019).

Research design
This study was conducted in an undergraduate English pre-service teacher education department of a private university in Indonesia. In the university, a guide book on how to conduct mentoring is delivered to every mentor in every department. Every year, a teaching faculty member is appointed to be dosen wali, which literally means 'guardian lecturer' according to Google Translate, but more or less functions as an 'academic advisor' (read: a mentor) for maximum 20 new students. Mentoring should be conducted regularly-at least 3 times in a semester (in the beginning, in the mid-semester, and at the end)-until the mentees graduate. During the classical meetings, the mentor is mainly expected to check the students' ability to make a decision in taking appropriate courses in the respective semester and their later preparedness for mid test and final test. An innovation was planned to be studied after a mentor teacher had done around a dozen mentoring meetings classically with all 16 mentees as expected by the university guide book. Because of the clarity, it is decided to use the four domains of Nora & Crisp (2007) described above as reference for this study: the mentor studied this concept before conducting the individual mentoring, and a questionnaire was designed to ask the students to identify which of the four domains comprised the individual mentoring they experienced. Those four domains are (1) psychological or emotional support, (2) support for goal setting and choosing a career, (3) academic support for their study, and (4) a role model (Nora & Crisp, 2007). It was intended to find out which of the four domains would be among the impact of this individual mentoring Mega Wati between the mentor teacher and student from the student's perspective, especially when the mentor was aware what should comprise the individual mentoring. Then, individual mentoring meetings were designed by asking the mentees to sign up in an informal meeting schedule with the mentor over lunch. Meal was chosen in order to help create a safe environment for them (Nora & Crisp, 2007;Nouwen, 1997). Students in general will welcome meal enthusiastically, while it is also true that a meal together is one of the most intimate human events that bond the people involved to become family, friends, or community (Nouwen, 1997). During or after lunch, the mentor would talk with the mentee casually and informally, starting with a simple question like, "What have you been doing lately?" After the individual student mentoring, both the mentor and the mentee were asked to write a simple reflection in their own convenience without communicating with each other. The prompt for the reflection was simply "What is the impact of today's meeting for me?" The students' written reflections were then studied and coded so as to categorise the findings into four domains as described above as well as to crosscheck the result of the short questionnaire given to the students. Meanwhile, the mentor teacher's written reflections were reviewed separately to find out how the individual student mentoring developed her professionally. If deemed necessary, an unstructured interview with the mentor or/and mentee(s) concerned was done to clarify as well as confirm the data studied.

Participants and ethical considerations
The participants of this research were 16 (sixteen) student mentees and 1 (one) female teaching faculty member as the mentor. They belong to an undergraduate English language pre-service teacher education department in a private university in Indonesia. The students were in the fifth semester when this study took place, and had already met with the mentor in around twelve classical mentoring meetings. The female mentor had taught English in the university for more than ten years before being assigned to be a teaching faculty member of the English Language Education Department. All the participants willingly participated without any coercion. They filled out their consent form and when offered, they preferred to have their anonymity kept (Oliver, 2003).

Data analysis
Data were taken from two resources and in two different forms. The first kind of data was in the form of short reflections, written by sixteen student mentees and one mentor. The second data were the result of the short questionnaire completed by the sixteen mentees. The questionnaire result and the student's reflection were studied and crosschecked to answer the first research question. Their written reflections were studied and coded in order to categorise the findings into four domains as described above as well as to crosscheck the result of the questionnaire given to the students. The mentor's reflections were studied to address the second research question on how she developed professionally after the individual mentoring with her students.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The discussion of the findings will be divided into two sections. First, the findings for the first research questions will be reported and discussed, then the findings for the second research question will follow. The impact of the individual student mentoring according to the students are shown in Figure 1. The finding satisfies the intention to see which of the four domains in Nora's and  study comprise the impact of the individual student mentoring. Most students (15 students or 93.8% from the population) stated that this kind of mentoring provided psychological and emotional support for them. Half of the population (8 students-50%) expressed that they gained academic subject knowledge support, while some students (6 students-37.5%) thought they were given support on goal setting and career paths, and a few (4 students-25%) recognized the existence of a role model. The result of the questionnaire, designed in such as way so as to allow a student to choose more than one option in completing it, shows that in the students' perspectives the individual mentoring is very fruitful because it can provide multidimensional impact. This finding is certainly in line with the result of Nora and Crisp's study when they used the four constructs with 200 mentee participants in a two-year higher education institution in the south-central area of the United States in the academic year of 1997. However, there is a slight difference between their study and my study in terms of the finding. Their study found out that three of the four dimensions comprised the mentoring experiences of the mentees, which in sequence were educational/career goal-setting and appraisal, emotional and psychological support, and academic subject knowledge support aimed at advancing a student's knowledge relevant to their chosen field. In my study, with less number of mentee participants and different research design, all the four dimensions according to the theoretical framework of mentoring were acknowledged to be present in the mentoring, including the existence of a role model. The three dimensions are the same as their finding, but in different order of importance according to my research finding, which in sequence are psychological and emotional support, academic subject knowledge support, and goal setting and career paths. When the result of the questionnaire shown in Figure 1 was crosschecked with the students' reflections, these two data matched. For example, here is an excerpt of a female student's reflection, in which she explained that in her case, psychological support is the only impact that she had: Concerning the existing role model that a mentee can have from a mentoring process, this excerpt deserves special attention: I felt re-motivated, re-spirited. I felt like I had a parent who was willing to listen in this (city). I become more certain with what I need to do in the near future. (Student D, translated, emphasis is mine) Even though the mentor never had any plan to position herself as a parent, the fact that this particular mentee caught the image of one is the result of perceived role model. Research has identified the emergence of a mentor as a wise person, guide, and stand-in parent in the mentee's growth and development (Bierema et al., 2002). Also undeniably true is the underlying fact that it is possible that the mentor had subconsciously perceived mentoring relationship as parenting (Izadinia, 2015). Further review of the mentee students' reflections, moreover, has resulted in two other findings beyond the purpose of this study, which cannot be ignored because of their significance. The first came from-among others-this student who implied that the mentoring process was reciprocal, and thus confirms what Jacobi (1991 in Crisp & Cruz, 2009) characterizing mentoring as personal and reciprocal: It's a beautiful chance to share and learn. I'd like to share something like this and hearing an encouraging response from someone else is just beautiful. I feel mentally a bit relief and I got an informative sharing as well. (Student R, emphasis is mine) The other was apparent from this student's excerpt, which implied the importance of time and process in-especially-individual mentoring: I would say that it wasn't an instant event that happened in 2-3 hours but it was a long process of mentoring. I was more motivated to learn how to understand myself and other people around me through the individual sharing. (Student N, partly translated, emphasis is mine.) From the mentee's clarification and the mentor's additional information, it turned out that she had also done individual mentoring with several mentee students on necessity basis, from the perspectives of either the mentee or the mentor who would then initiate the contact. This 'personal chat'-in the mentor's term-through WhatsApp took place outside the regular classical mentoring, and was not considered mentoring by the mentor until this was mentioned by one of the student participants in her reflection. Therefore, it was ecstatic and hopeful to find out from this mentee student that this kind of personal and individual contact through the medium of technology was counted as fruitful and impactful mentoring process too. In fact, Bierema et al. (2002) have observed the phenomenon of what they identified as E-mentoring, the definition of which is a mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationship mediated by computer technology, which provides learning, advising, encouraging, promoting, and modelling. This E-mentoring is often without boundary, egalitarian, and qualitatively different than traditional face-to-face mentoring. They further exemplified computer-mediated communication as communication facilitated by the medium of technology such as email, chat groups, and computer conferencing. This finding of the potential E-mentoring is very essential in tackling one of the problems in implementing good mentoring discussed earlier: finding time for individual mentoring (Bierema et al., 2002;Little, 1990in Fullan et al., 2010. If the definition of mentoring is expanded by including this newly proposed E-mentoring definition, it is possible to maintain the implementation of good mentoring, which requires frequent and regular interactions between the mentor and the mentee. At least, this is what the surprising finding of this study suggests.

How the mentor is developed professionally
In this study, it is found that individual student mentoring has developed the mentor in a similar way to the one stated by Fullan et al., (2010) that while a mentee benefits greatly from the mentor, a mentor also learns from their mentee such things as developing new insights into their own teaching, building new relationships, and gaining a renewed enthusiasm and commitment to their profession. First, she reflected that she developed her interactional skills, especially in her ability to be engaged in mentoring conversations that are likely to promote the mentee's personal and professional development (Timperley, 2001). Second, she developed new insights about each of the student mentees, which in turn renewed her enthusiasm in living her vocation. Each will be discussed further. First, it is interesting to remember that teaching is an interpersonal, emotional, and social profession (Hudson, 2010). This individual student mentoring was regarded by the mentor to have developed her skills in developing such personal interactions which are free from the urge to teach and judge. As stated earlier, active, empathetic, and genuine listening is the requirement to provide psychological or emotional support in mentoring (Nora & Crisp, 2007). So are understanding and accepting student's feeling, identifying problems and giving encouragement. This is what she thought the developed skills in her. In an unstructured interview to further re-Mega Wati view her written reflections, the mentor admitted that these acts were actually the most difficult for her: For me, who have been a teacher and parent for quite a long time, and who have done classical mentoring for around twelve times, to listen and accept whatever feelings they share without interrupting them to say "You are wrong" requires a lot of discipline. The urgency to speak more, to teach and give advice is probably rooted in my life as an educator. So when I found that they thought they received psychological support during mentoring I was very glad. I won over myself! She further shared her critical self-monitoring (Foord, 2009) upon how much giving suggestions she did in the mentoring, which she had regretted: she found from her end-of-mentoring reflections that she gave suggestions or advice to six student mentees (37.5%). Second, as she rechecked the reflections she wrote right after each individual mentoring, the mentor realised that the direct impact for her was a paradigm shift about the student mentees. Some excerpts from her end-of-mentoring reflections illustrate this.
Even though I thought he was an introvert, he talked a lot with me... (The 5th reflection) How could she survive this kind of abuse and still become intact? (The 12th reflection) I never would have thought that she had a dream to continue her study! (The 16th reflection) She knew a lot more things about and from the student mentees-something that she had never experienced before in teaching this group of students in several classes nor in previous classical mentoring-so that she suddenly saw a different person in each of her mentees: she discovered many virtues that made her appreciate the person more. She noticed how they know what they like doing and therefore have gained practical as well as deep knowledge in those things; they have the ability to analyse their own successes and failures and learn from them as well; they are compassionate to their family and friends; they actually work hard in their life because they have a part-time job while they are studying; they have some traumatic experience in their childhood, the effect of which they can identify and attempt to manage up to the present; and they have a dream for their future. This finding is deemed valuable by the mentor teacher because learning about the student mentees softened her heart and humbled her. As a teacher or a teaching faculty member, she realized that subconsciously she had put herself in a higher position than the student's in terms of academic achievement as well as of life experience (Kuswandono, 2017). When she talked heart to heart with an individual student in this non-classical mentoring, however, she was humbled to admit that she "learned a lot from this younger, less academically abled, and inexperienced person". From this realization, she felt that her enthusiasm in fulfilling her vocation as a teacher was renewed and confirmed. The finding is in line with the concept of Freeman's descriptive model (Foord, 2009), which identified the four areas teachers can develop professionally. The mentor teacher in this study has developed three of the four possible areas: her skills, awareness, and attitude. She could share that she developed her interactional skills, she showed some awareness about herself, and she developed her attitude toward herself, her mentees, and her vocation as a teacher. Moreover, had she been more gentle with herself, she would have also admitted that she developed her knowledge too about some principles of mentoring. All in all, this study confirmed that individual student mentoring can have the impact for teacher professionalism, especially independent professionalism (Richards, 2008) in which the mentor herself as a teacher has been engaged in (1) reflection and critical review on her own values and beliefs; and (2) practices self-monitoring.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, this study has confirmed what is believed about individual student mentoring in English pre-service teacher education: that individual mentoring is impactful for teacher professionalism. The findings of this particular study-which are not supposed to be generalizedshow that through individual mentoring in a safe environment, pre-service teachers received psychological and emotional support, academic support, support for goal setting and choosing a career, and a role model. These supports and role model are important for pre-service teachers' personal and professional growth that make success with their future students possible. Moreover, the mentor teacher reflected that she also developed independent professionalism in three of the four possible areas, which were interactional skills, awareness, and attitude. An unexpected finding also suggested that the use of technology in mentoring, or in another word: E-mentoring, is fruitful in making sure the existence of absolute interactions and process for effective mentoring. Considering the value of individual mentoring in pre-service education as suggested by this study, it is recommended that the existing policy and implementation of mentoring in an English pre-service teacher education is reviewed and enhanced for the sake of teacher professional development for both parties involved. It is also realized, however, that this recommendation certainly invites a more thorough study.