Mentoring Teachers

Teachers who undertake the responsibility of mentoring a student teacher during a practice teaching session should have some understanding of how student teachers feel in their role as developing teachers in a school environment. One way to know this is to ask student teachers to reflect on, and articulate, their experience during the practicum, and then to listen carefully to the voices of these students in their reflective journals. The discourse of endurance that is revealed in the quotation above is something of which supervising/mentoring teachers should be aware as they take upon themselves the task of judge as well as mentor.

Another major issue was that the research design would have to take into account the fact that the student teachers were teaching mathematics on only two days a week while the mentoring teachers were teaching mathematics to the same children for the other three days of the week. While this proceeded naturally in the traditional classrooms without any intervention by the researcher, the alternative classrooms were the product of team meetings between the student teachers, the mentoring teachers, and the researcher, in order to ensure the consistency of the alternative approach. This clearly offered the student teachers extra opportunities for building their knowledge about teaching mathematics during these sessions for reflective discussion, evaluation, and planning.

Student teachers, however, usually occupy a different position in the classroom from the regular teacher. The students are teaching in classrooms where the mentoring teachers, from whom they are supposed to be learning about teaching, determine the nature of the culture in the mathematics classroom. The expected process is one of being an apprentice to the teacher and learning through that relationship. Eisenhart et al. (1993) document the potential tensions around this traditional field placement of student teachers who are educated for a reform agenda but whose mentoring teachers focus almost exclusively on procedural knowledge. They recommend creating special contexts for learning to teach which reflect the reform-oriented mathematics curriculum.

It is clear that the English experience has already demonstrated that the development of true partnerships between schools and HEIs has resulted in a much more open approach to teacher education. University teacher educators now must dialogue with mentor teachers about the school experience programs for student teachers, and reach agreement as to how responsibilities for those programs will be shared. This has called for a much more precise articulation of programs between schools and HEIs than has ever been achieved in the past. For teachers, these expanded responsibilities have brought a new sense of direction and purpose in the training of teachers. It has also brought the worry of added work and the need for further resourcing of schools to cope with the added task. For teacher educators in higher education it has meant a change of focus onto guiding mentoring teachers in their development of the mentoring skills called for in the new arrangements. Meetings between university and staff and teachers are necessary to organise and plan effective programs. This new shared experience has created a more participatory and collaborative environment for teacher education. Both sides benefit from the expertise of the other.

"Creating" the alternative classrooms clearly required the willing participation of the mentoring teachers in order to provide a consistent culture in the mathematics classroom. This methodology was influenced considerably by the large research studies conducted in the United States where "classroom-teaching experiments" provide the alternative mathematics classrooms for exploring children's mathematics.