An analysis of mentoring conversations with beginning teachers: suggestions and responses

Abstract

This study analyzes how mentor teachers make pedagogical suggestions to beginning teachers during mentoring conversations and how beginning teachers respond. Sixty-four conversations between 16 veteran teacher mentors and their beginning teacher protégés are examined and analyzed. The analysis reveals the extreme efforts of mentors to avoid giving direct advice, and a corpus that includes many indirect suggestions, about one-third of which produce elaborated responses from the novice teachers. It is suggested that the observed conversational patterns may be largely explained by the philosophy of the program (based on the Cognitive Coaching model) of which the mentors and beginning teachers are a part.