Mentoring pre-service teachers’ reflective practices towards producing teaching outcomes

T Sempowicz, P Hudson International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring 2012

Reflective practice appears crucial for professional growth; making connections between mentoring practices and mentees’ reflections may assist mentors to guide reflective processes. Thisinterpretive study initially explores common processes of reflective thinking in the literature. It thenuses a mentoring feedback framework with six practices to collect and analyse video, audio andobservational data around two mentor-mentee case studies with experienced primary teachers as the mentors and pre-service teachers as the mentees. The findings showed that these mentors articulatedexpectations for teaching, modelled reflective practices to their mentees, and facilitated time andopportunities for advancing teaching practices, which influenced the mentees’ reflective practices andtheir pedagogical development. This study demonstrated that the mentors’ personal attributes influenced the mentoring relationship and the mentees’ abilities to critically reflect on their practices.