‘It’s all about paying attention!’ … but to what? The ‘6 Ms’ of mentoring the professional learning of teacher educators

Abstract

Much of the international literature on professional learning in the field of education is predicated on the assumption that, for teacher educators and the teachers they work with alike, professional learning is a matter of rigorously applying the principles and strategies of ‘reflective practice’ and ‘critical reflection’. Professional learning for teacher educators is not just, or even, a matter of attending conferences, or spending a day reading in the library, or, for that matter, conducting empirical research in schools and classrooms. Rather, it is a matter of undertaking potentially transformative and rigorous investigations of their own professional practices in order to improve those practices. This article reports the findings of the authors’ self‐studies of their role as the mentors of groups of teacher educator colleagues, who were themselves engaged in action research on their work with teachers as their chosen mode of professional learning. From these studies of mentoring the professional learning of teacher educator colleagues, we have developed a conceptual model for ‘contextually responsive mentoring’ in teacher education. This model proposes that there are (at least) six core preoccupations of practice that tend to dominate teacher educators’ thinking when engaged in these kinds of professional learning enquiries, and that need to be attended to in the mentoring of such professional learning. Although it originates from investigations of the professional learning of in‐service teacher educators, we would argue that the model has relevance for all those teacher educators, and indeed all those teachers, who might be engaged in mentored reflective practice, action research, self‐study, and the like, as forms of professional development or learning.