CONTRIBUTIONS OF LITERATURE ABOUT MENTORING TO ENLIGHTEN TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN BRAZIL

Initiatives and experiences from different countries and cultures are an important research issue. This article focuses on mentoring in teachers’ professional development in Brazil, but it is part of a larger project that seeks an approximation in the area of teacher professional development among BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In Brazil, mentoring in teachers’ professional development is proposing interactions between University and schools. Besides this, some initiatives shed lights on this matter. We intend in this work a discussion about such a significant advance. Collaboration between institutions seems to bring new ideas in developing countries trying to overcome difficulties in teachers' working conditions. The study collects a state of the art in the main Brazilian publications in the last five years about mentoring, both experiences related and theoretical studies. The results call attention to challenges and opportunities in teacher education regarding theory-practice integration and point out the need for further research.