Pasaulinė mokytojų rengimo patirtis rodo, kad mentorystė yra vienas veiksmingiausių būdų parengti profesionalius jaunus pedagogus. Mentorius - tai patyręs pedagogas, padedantis profesiškai tobulėti praktiką atliekančiam studentui ir pradedančiam dirbti pedagogui. Kad galėtų padėti jaunam žmogui tobulėti, įgyti praktines vaikų ugdymo kompetencijas bei sėkmingai pradėti karjerą, mentorius turi turėti tokiai veiklai būtinų kompetencijų. Straipsnyje pateikiama teorinė ikimokyklinio ugdymo pedagogo mentoriaus kompetencijų samprata, empiriniais tyrimais pagrįstas mentoriaus kompetencijų modelis. Sis modelis analizuojamas remiantis studentų praktikai vadovaujančių ikimokyklinio ugdymo mentorių nuomone.

The article discusses urgent problems of preschool education in Lithuania: the variety in young children education programmes and education organisation order, change in pre-school education and possibilities for its development. Having decentralised pre-school education and development of pre-school education programmes, there occur possibilities for a more intensive change in children education programmes. The article discusses the goals and content structure of programmes developed by pre-school education institutions and points out how alternative pre-school education systems and trends, children needs and priority areas of education are reflected in the programmes of different institutions. The variety in order of pre-school education organisation is also discussed and possibilities for expansion of pre-school education organisation order are discussed.

This paper analyzes and summarizes foreign authors' attitude towards professional development of beginner pedagogues and its stages as well as peculiarities of mentors' support. Also, the paper presents the research carried out by the Department of Childhood Studies of Vilnius University. The aim of the research was to identify the stage of professional development of preschool education students during their traineeship and beginner pedagogues, to analyze rising difficulties and the peculiarities of mentors' support. Hypothesis: both beginner pedagogues and preschool education students face the problems of organizing the training, the problems of maintaining discipline, lack of initiative, and the problems of integration into institution's community. Ways of mentors' assistance and cooperation meet the needs of charges; provide them with didactic help and help in organizing teaching process; however mentors rarely apply specific techniques and ways of support. Methods. of research: questioning of students, beginner pedagogues and mentors, exploratory experiment in order to evaluate the need for mentor's support and its effectiveness, observation. Participants of the research: 20 students with their mentors and 20 beginner pedagogues with their mentors, totally 80 people, took part in the research.

The article reviews the tendencies of change in pre-school and pre-primary education content over the last decade, that is, since the beginning of pre-school education reform in 1988. Conceptions of (self)-education content, theoretical principles that influenced the change in pre-school and pre-primary education content are analysed. the author reviews the key ideas of national level programmes and makes an attempt to highlight the models of education content and to provide their characteristics. Factors and processes of systemic change in content are discussed employing methods of theoretical analysis, comparison and generalisation.

Children’s perspective-taking skills and multi-perspective attitudes comprise the basis for their social competence. From the educational point of view, it is particularly important to demonstrate the methods that promote children’s understanding of their own and others’ perspectives, since these enable them to develop a multi-perspective attitude. The article discusses perspective-taking skills (perceptive, cognitive, affective) and shows the stages of the development of perspective-taking skills in early childhood through discussion of research on social perspective-taking and visuospatial perspective-taking. The article also attempts to synthesise the conclusions of research with respect to the development of perspective-taking and the multi- perspective attitude. Qualitative research is presented through which the methods utilised by teachers to develop the perspective-taking capacities of groups of 5-6 year olds are demonstrated.