In the context of teacher education, mentoring starts when beginning teachers (BT) start their work at school. Mentoring is naturally connected to the improvement of education at school and therefore is often considered a means to promote teachers’ retention (Sunde and Ulvik, 2014). The work done by Ingersoll and Strong (2011) show that supporting BT has a positive effect on commitment, classroom management and students’ achievements. There are many interpretations of mentoring for BT as a practice, from taking mentoring as a tool for facilitating BTs' professional growth and identifying pedagogical strategies (Sunde and Ulvik, op. cit.), to seeing mentoring as a social practice that highly depends on the mentor-BT (mentee) interactions, and the ecological context (Heikkinen, 2020). In Israel, the common perception is that mentoring serves as a tool for teachers’ assessment and as a way of imparting teaching practices (Schatz-Oppenheimer, 2011). Therefore, mentors are trained to assess and support BTs' teaching and classroom management work. This presentation focuses on mentors’ perception about mentoring, as manifested in a special mentoring training course conducted in the framework of the Promentors EU-funded project (Erasmus+ 610448-EPP-1-2019-1-IL-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). The design of the course was based on the MIT (Multi-Player Induction Teams; Kaplan et al., 2021), which involves BT during their induction, mentors and policy makers. The course was conducted at Netiv Yitzhak school in Netivot, a city in southern Israel. Most of the city's residents are Jews who immigrated from Arab countries (mainly Yemen and Morocco), and maintain a traditional Jewish culture, with a community life based on much reciprocal interest and care of the others' wellbeing. The mentors training course involved 9 mentors and 16 BT meeting in Zoom for 1.5 hours. The mentors were asked to write a reflective report after each meeting and an essay summarizing their experience in the course. Five of these mentors were also interviewed. Our research question examined the characteristics of the mentors’ perceptions about mentoring. All the reflective reports and the interviews were qualitatively coded using the ATLAS.ti tool. Fifty reports and 5 interviews were coded, approaching 70% of inter-rater-reliability agreement between 3 coders. Preliminary findings from the study indicate the centrality of the emotional support taken by mentors towards their BT-mentees. In the symposium we will discuss possible relations between mentoring characterized by the presence of that emotional component and the distinct cultural elements of the community of Netivot.

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