Developing and Nurturing Professional Teaching Dispositions for First Year Students in the Bahrain Teachers College

Abstract

Other than content and the pedagogical knowledge and skills, many successful teacher education programs around the world have identified professional dispositions as essential in assessing the effectiveness of their teacher candidates. Best practices in teacher education demand that teacher candidates must acquire a set of positive professional dispositions before being licensed. Moreover, demonstrating evidence to address professional teaching dispositions in teacher preparation programs has be come a requirement for accreditation. For example, the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) in the USA requires that in-service teachers obtain positive dispositions along with content and pedagogical knowledge. Ample research in the field of teacher education concluded that effective teachers and teacher candidates need to develop positive professional teaching dispositions. This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of an intensive mentoring program on developing and nurturing dispositions for teacher candidates at Bahrain Teachers College. Twenty-four students who participated in the study were divided into two groups; experimental and control group. A paired t-test revealed significant improvement in dispositions between the pre-, and post-test results for the experiment group. The study also concluded that dispositions can be developed through coursework. his study offers suggestions and recommendations of useful strategies that help teacher candidates to cultivate positive professional teaching dispositions.