Reconciling mentor and residence lecturer’s scores in grading students on teaching practice to be true reflection of students' performance

Abstract

With the increasing number of students who qualify and enroll in universities the world over, and also in the various faculties and colleges of education studies, where students-teachers are trained for the teaching profession, it has become obvious that resident university teachers alone are unable to give ample supervision and monitoring to student-teacher trainees who go out of the campuses to experience real teaching practice. This is often referred to, as external or out of campus teaching practice. In trying to find solution to this vacuum created by insufficient lecturers, not being able to give enough supervisions and assessment scores to grade the practicing teachers, tutors or individuals in the various localities and/or institutions where the student-teachers do the external teaching practice are contracted by the universities as either mentors or internal supervisors to take oversight responsibilities of the student teachers formation, alongside the university lecturers, termed as external supervisors. This paper seek to find out how to reconcile the grading scores of the mentors or internal supervisors which at times, is often on the high side, as against the lecturers or external supervisors scores in order to reflect the true performance levels of the student teachers. This paper also lines up some suggested solutions to the dilemma in order to reflect the real students’ performance scores.