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

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Teaching and Teacher Education 20 (2004) 47–57

*Correspondin

831-459-3822.

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0742-051X/$ - see

doi:10.1016/j.tat

An analysis of mentoring conversations with beginningteachers: suggestions and responses

Michael Strong*, Wendy Baron

Santa Cruz New Teacher Center, University of California, 725 Front St., Suite 400, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA

Received 16 August 2002; received in revised form 4 April 2003; accepted 19 September 2003

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 prot!eg!es 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.

r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Teacher mentoring; Conversational analysis; Indirect suggestions

1. Introduction

1.1. Background

With veteran teachers retiring, class size reduc-tions, and increasing numbers of children enteringschool, more than half of the teachers in America’sclassrooms will be hired during the coming decade.As many as 50% of beginning US teachers quitteaching within the first seven years (Huling-Austinet al., 1986), with 15% leaving in their first year(Kronowitz, 1992). In California especially, thestatistics are daunting. The state will need to hire anaverage of 30,600 teachers a year through 2004–

g author. Tel.: +1-831-459-4323; fax: +1-

ss: [email protected] (M. Strong).

front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserv

e.2003.09.005

2005 to meet the demands of attrition, retirement,and student growth, in addition to preparing theexisting 33,000 under-qualified teachers for creden-tialing (Schields et al., 2001).

Teachers today are being asked to teachtechnological and analytical skills to students froma broad range of backgrounds, prepare them toread and write at sophisticated levels, to thinkcritically, and to apply their knowledge to solvingreal-world problems. In short, the skills teachersneed to develop are both complex and demanding(Borko & Livingston, 1989). To help new teachersmeet these challenges, at least 27 states haveinitiated new teacher induction programs, wherementoring is typically the form of support offered(Fideler & Haselkorn, 1999).

Mentoring is popular in many different fields:medicine (e.g., Ramanan, Phillips, Davis, Silen, &

ed.

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M. Strong, W. Baron / Teaching and Teacher Education 20 (2004) 47–5748

Reede, 2002); social services (e.g., Kelly, 2001);city management (e.g., Fox & Schuhmann, 2001);law (e.g., Wallace, 2001); industry (e.g., Bernard,2001); banking (e.g., Delobbe & Vandenberghe,2001); the military (e.g., Johnson et al., 2001);prisons (e.g., Wittenberg, 1998); performing arts(e.g., Patrick, 2002); and sport (e.g., Weaver &Chelladurai, 1999). Mentoring for new teachers isespecially prevalent in California, where the stateprovides funding for new teacher support inalmost every school district. Within this contextof teacher induction, mentoring refers to thepartnering of a veteran teacher with a beginningteacher to provide ‘‘systematic and sustained assis-tance’’ to novice teachers (Huling-Austin, 1990).

A number of research studies on new teachermentoring have been conducted in the past 15years. The direction of this work has moved fromstudying the effects of mentoring (e.g., Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1993; Odell & Ferraro, 1992;Strong & St. John, 2001), and describing andcomparing programs (e.g., Klug & Salzman,1991), to an examination of the mentoring processamong individual mentor–mentee pairs (e.g.,Achinstein & Villar, 2002; Wang & Paine, 2002).

The relationship between mentor and prot!eg!e iscomplex and will vary to some extent according tothe design and structure of the particular programin which the participants are enrolled (Tauer,1996). Programs may focus to different degrees onemotional and pedagogical support, and thementor may or may not have a formal evaluativerole. The fundamental elements of the expert–novice relationship prevail, however, and theattendant power differential must be negotiatedin order for a trusting relationship to develop(Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). The mentoringprocess, specifically as it is revealed in theconversations that take place between mentorand beginning teacher, is the focus of the workreported in this paper.

Sociolinguists interested in the manner in whichsuch unequal relationships are played out haveanalyzed conversations from a variety of settingsover the years: for example, between doctor andpatient (Fisher & Todd, 1983), therapist and client(Labov & Fanshel, 1977), mother and child (e.g.,Snow & Ferguson, 1977), teacher and student

(e.g., Borman, 1982). In the present study ofveteran and beginning teachers we have adopted atheoretical approach to the analysis of mentor/beginning teacher discourse that draws both frominteractional sociolinguistics (IS) (Schiffrin, 1994;Gumperz, 2001) and conversational analysis (CA)(Schiffrin, 1988). We examine interactions between16 veteran teacher mentors and their beginningteacher prot!eg!es in order to discover how mentorsmake pedagogical suggestions, and how beginningteachers respond. We feel this study is importantbecause mentoring relies so heavily on the mentor/novice relationship and assumes the mentors willgive advice and suggestions in the course of theirsystematic and sustained assistance that willdirectly change the new teacher’s practice.

1.2. Interactional sociolinguistics and CA

IS offers a framework for analyzing utterances asindicators of social, cultural, and personal meaning(Schiffrin, 1994). It is an approach that calls on theinvestigator to take into account both local andmore global contexts, thus going beyond the literalmeaning of an utterance for interpreting thespeaker’s intentions. As Schiffrin (1994) explains it:

Any one utterance is assumed to be sequentiallyrelevant to what came before (its local context)and to a general framework of understandingsabout a particular ‘type’ of situation (its globalcontext). (p. 407)

In this way, by viewing utterances withindiscourse as both contextualized and contextualiz-ing, IS analysis points towards most likely inter-pretations, the assumptions and inferentialprocesses that lead to them, and how they relateto what is actually said (Gumperz, 2001).

According to Gumperz (2001), the standardmethodological procedures used by IS analystsinvolve: (1) determining the local communicativecontext; (2) identifying suitable contexts forcollecting interactional data; (3) finding out fromobservation and interviews with potential partici-pants what their presuppositions are and how theyhandle problems; (4) selecting interactions forrecording; (5) scanning recordings first for contentand second for pronunciation and prosodic

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M. Strong, W. Baron / Teaching and Teacher Education 20 (2004) 47–57 49

organization. Success in these steps will produce acorpus of interactions that include empirical datafrom which to form and test hypotheses, interpret,and infer the participants’ intentions. This,broadly, is the method we adopted here.

CA, in contrast, focuses only on the contextsthat can be empirically attested through actualspeech or behavior (Schiffrin, 1994). Althoughrooted in sociology and ethnomethodology, CApays little attention to social setting, identities ofparticipants, personal attributes, etc. Instead, eachutterance is seen as in a sequence shaped by a priorcontext of utterances, while itself influencing thefuture context of other utterances. Thus, meaningsand knowledge are continually adjusted andsequentially emergent (Schiffrin, 1994). Becauseconversations involve both a speaker and a hearer,conversation analysts, influenced by the traditionof ethnomethodology, often focus on what iscalled the adjacency (or dialogic) pair; that is, asequentially constrained pair of turns at talk, suchas question–answer or offer-acceptance, in whichthe presence of the first part of a pair creates acondition for the occurrence of a second part.Goffman (1981) suggested that adjacency pairs maybe part of a more general set of system and ritualconditions, based on the speaker’s need to knowthat a message has been received and understood,and a recipient’s need to show that it has beencorrectly received. These conditions, Goffmanclaims, must be fulfilled in order for conversationto occur. In adopting an analytical perspective thatdraws from both IS and CA we recognize theimportance of context, both internal and external,in the interpretation of conversational exchanges,and we make the assumption that interlocutors’joint construction of meaning can be observed inthe analysis of dialogic pairs, identified in appro-priate corpora of conversational discourse, andcontextualized within their linguistic frames.

1 Quoted from the Santa Cruz New Teacher Project brochure.

2. Method

2.1. The data

A large proportion of the work of mentors ingeneral, and of those in this study in particular, is

accomplished through talk. The program fromwhich our sample is drawn has as its primarygoal ‘‘to provide a program of support andassessment in which the advancement of skillsand knowledge is a continuous flow from pre-service through the first two years of teaching andbeyond’’.1

Having reviewed the work of the mentors andbeginning teachers enrolled in the new teachersupport program under investigation, we deter-mined that they all took part in a set ofconversations that typically occurred before andafter a beginning teacher’s lesson that the mentorwas to observe formally. These consisted of aplanning session during which the mentor andbeginning teacher would preview the focal lesson,and a debriefing session, the purpose of which wasfor both parties to reflect upon the beginningteacher’s lesson after observation by the mentor.The conversations were not only common to allmentor/mentee pairs, but they were fairly consis-tent in subject matter, and had the promise ofbeing a fertile source of pedagogical suggestionsfrom the mentors. However, such conversationsare not random dialogues between mentor andteacher. They take on the character more of anopen-ended interview than a naturalisticconversation. The mentor is guided by a specificprotocol of topics, aligned with the CaliforniaStandards for the Teaching Profession, that needto be addressed in both planning and reflectingconferences. Nevertheless, there is considerableflexibility in how closely the protocol isfollowed and the manner in which issues areintroduced. How these conversations might beclassified is an important issue that is taken uplater in this paper.

We issued each mentor with a tape recorder anda supply of audiotapes, and requested that theyrecord a pre- and a post-observation conversationon two occasions, once towards the beginning ofthe school year and a second time towards the end.This resulted in a corpus of conversations thatvaried in length from about 15 min to almost anhour.

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2.2. The question

Our research question is two-fold:

How do mentor teachers make pedagogicalsuggestions to beginning teachers during men-toring conversations, and how do the teachersrespond?

2.3. Suggestions and responses

Determining whether a suggestion is a sugges-tion is not as straightforward as a dictionarydefinition might imply. Suggestions, like requests,may be seen as falling on a continuum from directto indirect, with the most direct suggestionslooking more like commands:

1. ‘‘I suggest you have them work in pairs.’’And the most indirect suggestions more like

comments:2. ‘‘Pair work would be good here.’’Between these two more extreme examples fall a

host of possible indirect forms where suggestionsmay be tempered, for example, by a conditional:

3. ‘‘I was wondering if you might want to havethem work in pairs.’’

Or a testimonial:4. Many teachers like to have them work in

pairs.Also, a suggestion may appear in the guise of a

question:5. What do you think about having them work

in pairs?The two possible responses to a suggestion are

acceptance or rejection. The absence of a responsemay indicate either one. Rejections and accep-tances may be plain affirmations or denials, orthey may be accompanied by explanation or thepostulation of alternative suggestions, in whichcase we refer to them as elaborated responses.

2.4. Procedures

All 64 conversations were transcribed with afocus on content. Subsequent additional detail toinclude prosodic features has yet to be added.These transcripts were then reviewed for allinstances of suggestions offered by mentors. The

conversational segments that included the sugges-tions and the beginning teachers’ responses werethen excerpted, together with their surroundingconversational context. Suggestions were thencategorized as either direct or indirect, with furthercategories for the different forms of indirectness.Responses were tagged as either acceptances orrejections, with elaborations or alternative sugges-tions coded separately. The content of eachsuggestion was also coded by topic. Focal cate-gories were teaching, student, teaching/studentcombination, subject matter, or mentoring. Thefirst author, who also developed the codingsystem, conducted the initial pass through thedata. After a conference with the second author,the coding system was slightly modified, and bothresearchers then reviewed all the excerpted tran-scripts with their coded suggestions, discussing anyinitial disagreements until they were resolved. Thelines of dialogue that included the mentor sugges-tions, the teacher responses, and the immediatesurrounding context amounted to 20% of the totalconversational corpus.

3. Findings

The results of the categorization of suggestionsand responses are displayed in Table 1.

3.1. Suggestions

We identified a total of 206 suggestions in thecorpus of which 10 we considered direct and therest indirect. We classified the indirect suggestionsinto four general categories. Most common (38%)were those embedded within an expression ofpossibility or conditionality. These suggestionsoften included such words as perhaps, maybe,

might, could, or wonder. Two examples from thiscategory are seen in the following mentor com-ments:

6. Mentor: I wonder if there was a strategy youcould have used to make it even more accessibleto the English Language Learners, instead ofverballyy’’

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Table 1

Distribution of suggestions and responses from 64 conversations between 16 mentor/beginning teacher pairs

Suggestions Responses

Accept A+Elab Reject R+Elab T %

Direct 7 0 0 3 10 5

Indirect/possibility 44 18 9 7 78 38

Indirect/question 43 17 3 6 69 33

Indirect/anecdote 17 4 5 5 31 15

Indirect/reformulation 10 5 1 2 18 9

Total 121 44 18 23 206

Percentage 59 21 9 11


7. Mentor: ‘‘What I was thinking was maybe ifyou had the vocabulary words up there it wouldhelp.’’

The second group of indirect suggestions con-sisted of those posed in the form of a question.They made up 33% of the total. The mentors usedthree question forms to make suggestions, a simplequestion that includes a new idea, a question withtwo equal alternatives, and a question with twoalternatives where one is clearly preferred. Exam-ples 8–10 illustrate these three forms of indirectsuggestion:

8. Mentor: ‘‘OK, so after you tell the kids whatthey’re going to do, you do your introduction. Areyou going to, will you ask the kids what the topicmight be?’’

9. Mentor: ‘‘Will you record those on the board,or are you going to have a chart, ory?’’

10. Mentor: ‘‘OK, I’m curious if you’re going tomodel first to warm them up, or get right into thereading of the paragraph?’’

Teacher: ‘‘I would model it in the first smallparagraph which we’ll do in the class and thenwe’ll move into the article and they’ll be able to seethe words.’’

The third most common form of indirectsuggestion (15%) was presented as a recom-mended idea that had been seen elsewhere, reador heard about. This is demonstrated in thefollowing example:

11. Mentor: ‘‘yI’ve seen people do sequencing,so they would do a lesson like that, and then theywould have the steps written out in sentence strips,and then they would maybe mix it up and have the

kids put the sentences back in order. Then read itback again.’’

Teacher: ‘‘That would be good.’’Less often (9%) the mentor would introduce a

suggestion with a reformulation or paraphrasingof a teaching idea or technique previously de-scribed by the teacher.

12. Teacher: ‘‘yI was going to read an exampleof the myth and talk about the different parts of it,um, and how it was put together today for somescaffolding, and I was hoping to have them starttoday on either a story map style, because we’vedone that in here. Something to generate ideas.’’

Mentor: ‘‘Sure, all right, so they’ve hadexperience with a story map, you’re going to readit to them, you’re going to use that as the model ofthe parts of the mythy and they’ll do the roughdraft. Are they going to do some peer editing onthat?’’

Once or twice this kind of construction was usedto introduce a suggestion even when the teacherhad not postulated the idea first.

Least common (5%) were the direct suggestions,and even they were not as ‘directive’ as one mightexpect from an expert mentoring a novice. Thefollowing example is the most direct suggestion wecould find in the whole corpus:

13. Mentor: ‘‘yTry a roundtable. Even withyour afternoon group, you know, and just seewhat comes up as a strategy, and then you’ll bebetter equipped to deal with it as far as, you know,when the real lesson comes.’’

We observed a couple of additional featuresthat were sometimes contained in the mentors’

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Table 2

Distribution of suggestions among topics

Topic Suggestions

Number Percentage

Teaching 144 70

Teaching and student 17 8

Student 36 18

Mentoring 4 2

Subject matter 5 2

Totals 206 100


suggestions. One was praise, the other was whatmight be called therapeutic language. An apparentstrategy for the mentors was sometimes to softentheir suggestions by appending or inserting anencouraging or congratulatory remark:

14. Mentor: ‘‘I wonder if there was a strategyyou could have used to make it even moreaccessible to the ELLs [English Language Lear-ners]; instead of verbally; but what we know is thatkids that aren’t auditory learners need to see itvisually; and it was a great example.’’

Teacher: ‘‘Maybe I could have put myexample on the overhead.’’

Mentor: ‘‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.’’On other occasions, mentors would use ther-

apeutic language such as ‘‘tell me a little aboutyour thoughts here,’’ or ‘‘how does that feel?’’inviting the beginning teacher to give open-endedresponses.

In general, suggestions were distributed amongall the mentor/teacher pairs, and occurred in aboutequal numbers in planning and reflecting conver-sations, although the reflecting conversationstended to be longer. Frequency of occurrence didnot significantly vary according to whether theconversations were planning or reflecting, orwhether they took place at the beginning or endof the year.

3.2. Responses

As can be seen in Table 1, teachers acceptedtheir mentors’ suggestions four times more oftenthan they rejected them (80% versus 20%). Aboutone-third of the time the teachers’ responses,whether accepting or rejecting a direct or indirectsuggestion, included elaboration or the postulationof an alternative idea. Examples 15 and 16demonstrate two elaborated responses on the partof beginning teachers.

15. Mentor: ‘‘I wondered if you’re at that placefor tomorrow, or if tomorrow you’re going to justhave your centers be more like 40 min, but I waswondering whether you were shooting to have asmall mini-lesson in there.’’

Teacher: ‘‘Right, um, yeah, I had thoughtabout it, and I would definitely want to work onthe editing, like I was thinking maybe what I

would do is a mini-lesson on the over-use of ‘y’.Like just, you know, show student sample, gothrough it, and they can go back to working ontheir paragraph that they’re working on.’’

In 15, the teacher accepts the mentor’s indirectsuggestion to use a mini-lesson, and then expandson how such a lesson might go. In 16, however, theelaboration comes about when the teacher rejectsthe mentor’s indirect suggestion:

16. Mentor: ‘‘At the beginning of the year youalso did a writing lesson and that was on helpingto develop richer language and the use ofadjectives. Are you going to bring that into thislesson at all? Are you going to because you talkedabout paragraphing and supporting details andhaving topic sentences; are there any areas as faras your pre-write that you are going to address tomaybe get them thinking about expanding whatthey write, I guess maybe with those details they’llget there, but will it be part of the lesson at all?’’

Teacher: ‘‘I’m not going to make it a bigfocus. I think what I really want to focus on istheir feelings, and, I mean, it’s always been anongoing battle, but, you know, I always say giveme details, give me details, be specific, so it is kindof always there, but won’t be a focus.’’

3.3. Content

Table 2 shows the distribution of mentors’suggestions by content. The great majority ofsuggestions focused on teaching (70%). A further18% were related to students, either individuals,subgroups, or the whole class. A small proportion(8%) had a combined focus, including both apedagogical and a student element. Least often

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were suggestions related to subject matter (2%),and the mentoring process itself (2%). There wereno apparent relationships between content andkind of suggestion, except that a disproportionatenumber of the direct suggestions (five out of 10)pertained to students.

4. Discussion

Four aspects of the above findings deservefurther discussion:

* the small percentage of direct suggestions;* the linguistic forms of the mentors’ indirect

suggestions;* the content of the mentors’ suggestions;* the ratio of elaborated to unelaborated begin-

ning teacher responses.

We might be excused for assuming that when anexpert veteran teacher becomes mentor to a noviceteacher, part of that person’s role would includegiving straightforward pedagogical advice (indeed,the mentors in this study are referred to as‘advisors’ by their prot!eg!es.) Furthermore, wemight reasonably anticipate that the noviceteacher would expect to receive direct advice froma mentor, if not overtly request it. So when, in acorpus of more than 30 hours of mentor conversa-tions, we find a mere 10 instances where thementor makes a direct suggestion, we areprompted to search for an explanation for thenon-realization of our expectations. As notedearlier, in the approach to discourse analysisadvocated by IS, appeal might be made to contextsboth internal and external to the text in order tointerpret it. In the present situation, three contextsare relevant, each of which will be discussed inturn.

At the level of the conversation itself, certaincontextual factors may be influential. Firstly, asnoted before, the mentors and beginning teachersare not engaged in ordinary conversations (Lakoff,1982). That is, these are not random conversa-tions, and they are not fully reciprocal. Thementor has an agenda to assess teaching practicethat is influenced, if not determined, by a protocol

of topics to be covered that are themselves relatedto such things as the state teaching standards andthe philosophy of the program of which bothmentor and teacher are a part. The mentordetermines the format and topics of the conversa-tion, and usually when it begins and ends.Furthermore, spontaneity may be further compro-mised for both participants, to a greater or lesserextent, by the knowledge that the conversation isbeing recorded, thereby introducing the addedinhibitive factor of an invisible audience. Whilethese conditions may cause us to distrust thenaturalness of the conversation, they do notexplain why mentors should apparently go out oftheir way to avoid making direct suggestions.

Our quest for an explanation leads us, then,beyond the immediate conversational situation tothe context of the program that organizes thesupport for the beginning teachers and trains thementors. The participants we studied are asso-ciated with one of California’s Beginning TeacherSupport and Assistance (BTSA) programs, thedesign of which is greatly influenced by, althoughnot wholly faithful to or confined by, the CognitiveCoaching model (Costa & Garmston, 1993, 1994).This approach to mentoring focuses on developingthoughtful, reflective practitioners who can ‘‘makechanges in their own thinking and teachingprocesses’’ (1993, p. 15). The format of thecoaching style includes the pre-conference, lessonobservation, and post-conference that we wit-nessed in our study.

Above all, cognitive coaching emphasizes thedevelopment of trust between mentor and teacher,the engagement of the teachers’ higher cognitivefunctions, and the development of teachers’cognitive autonomy. The mentors are trained topromote thinking and elicit ideas from the teachersprimarily by asking non-judgmental questions,listening, and providing non-evaluative feedbackthrough paraphrasing, clarifying, and presentingempirical evidence from the classroom observa-tions. These features of the mentors’ training maygo a long way towards explaining our findings.Since participation in the BTSA program isvoluntary, an emphasis is placed on developingtrust. This may discourage mentors from makingstatements that might cause defensiveness, and the

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elimination of evaluative comments precludesdirect suggestions that might be regarded by thereceiver as implied negative judgements.

A reviewer of the Cognitive Coaching syllabus(Costa & Garmston, 1994) is soon aware of theconsiderable energy devoted to the practice ofposing ‘‘mediational’’ questions in a positive, non-judgmental way in order to elicit thinking from theteacher. Framing hypothesizing questions using‘‘might,’’ checking on feelings, and using para-phrase are techniques recommended in the sylla-bus (together with sample linguistic formulations).This coaching model teaches how to pose possibi-lities instead of how to give advice or make directsuggestions. A strict adherent to this methodwould, therefore, justifiably feel uncomfortablegiving advice. However, the program from whichour examples are drawn departs sharply from thestrict, traditional Cognitive Coaching model2 byadvocating that its mentors engage in directteaching. This may account for the particularlinguistic features of the many indirect suggestionsseen in our transcripts, as the mentors attempt tocombine two apparently conflicting notions ofcoaching. Also relevant here is the work on thenorms of egalitarianism in the teaching professionwhere autonomy and privacy make advice-givingproblematic (Warren-Little, 1990).

It is a reasonable hypothesis that the mentorshave internalized the tenets and egalitarian normsof the Cognitive Coaching model and are thereforeinclined to give teaching advice only indirectly, toavoid judgment and evaluation, and to promotetrust and independent thinking.

Further evidence in the data supports thishypothesis. For example, on occasion a mentorwill protest that he or she is not actually givingadvice when the words indicate otherwise:

17. Mentor: ‘‘Right, so it might be, given yourfocus is organization, is there an introduction?OK, an intro, the main body, and a conclusion.Would you be as specific as to say, like this:introduction, and then having them say what theyused? I’m not suggesting, I’m just asking.’’

2 A recent edition of Cognitive Coaching recognizes the

importance of direct teaching in a novice–mentor relationship.

See Costa and Kallick (2000).

Teacher: ‘‘Yeah, I think it would help bothparties.’’

On other occasions a teacher requests advicedirectly, but the mentor decides to gather moreinformation first, paraphrasing and then posinganother question, for example:

18. Teacher: ‘‘ySo, what I need help with isfiguring out how much I want them to writey’’

Mentor: ‘‘Right. Backing up a minute. Idon’t know when we talked about this. Organiza-tion is your goaly you’ve really scaffolded theprocess, and now the question is how much theyshould write. Um, you talked before at some pointabout a transition where you actually gave themseveral pictures and then you wrote from that.Have they done that?’’

The exchange in 18 began with the teacherasking for advice on how much the studentsshould write. The mentor asked several questionsabout instruction and made an indirect suggestionrelated to how to have the students do the writing.Finally the teacher realizes that the question ofhow much they should write is unimportant, thus,in fact, justifying the mentor’s avoidance of givinga direct answer to the original question:

19. Teacher: ‘‘ywhat I would like to do is havea transition up on the board so I would have astory in pictures up on the board and then askthem to sit down and then maybe write down whatthat story says to them so that they get that ideageneratedy’’

Mentor: ‘‘That sounds perfect.’’The third context that comes into play is that of

the prevailing culture. All the mentors in thisstudy, consistent with the dominant populationfrom which our teachers are drawn, are middle-class, white women. A majority of the teachers arealso women, mostly white, some Latina. It hasbeen argued that cultural factors (Fitch & Sanders,1994), and social factors (Ervin-Tripp, 1976) areimportant influences on the use of direct directives.This relates, according to Fitch and Sanders, to thedegree to which individual autonomy is conceivedto be a central defining feature of the self. For theNorth American white middle class, that aspect ofselfhood is crucial (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan,Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Carbaugh, 1988). Sincesuggestions and directives often fall into the same

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class of speech acts, it is reasonable to predict thatthey may be perceived by some cultural groups asimpositions on the autonomy of individuals, andhence to be avoided.

In order to test the hypothesis that theconversational forms found in our data are bestexplained by program and cultural contexts, weneed to look at comparison data from mentors andnovice teachers in other programs and othercultures. In data on mentoring in China, forexample, preliminary findings suggest a verydifferent conversational style that includes manymore direct suggestions (Wang & Paine, 2002). Weintend to pursue this question in future work. Inthe meantime, we submit that the program andcultural contexts are the primary cause of thenumber and forms of indirect suggestions found inour data.

As for the content of the mentors’ suggestions,the almost exclusive focus on teaching and studentissues is somewhat surprising, given that the mostlikely influence on content is the CaliforniaStandards for the Teaching Profession, and thesecover not only teaching and students, but alsosubject matter, effective environment, and profes-sional development. While elementary teachers arenot subject-matter specialists, we might still expectthem to work with their teachers on reading andmath knowledge. Again, there is evidence fromresearch in other cultures that the content ofmentor/novice conversations may vary in somenon US settings (Wang, Strong, & Odell, 2003).This is another area for further study.

The question remains as to whether givingadvice in the form of suggestions, either directlyor indirectly, inhibits or promotes thoughtfulresponses on the part of the novice teachers. Fromour sample we find that almost one-third of thementors’ indirect questions resulted in elaboratedresponses. Unfortunately, there are too few directsuggestions for us to determine if indirectness ismore or less likely than directness to engage theteacher in the issue at hand, and we have no datayet from mentors in other programs to indicatewhether these findings are typical. Nevertheless, inour data, a response is more likely to be elaboratedif the teacher rejects the mentor’s suggestion thanif the suggestion is accepted. Hence, a possible

strategy for the mentor interested in engaging ateacher might be, at least occasionally, to suggestan idea that is controversial or debatable. How-ever, the primary purpose of suggestions is notnecessarily to engage the listener into an elabo-rated response. Experienced mentors may simplydesire to point out a useful teaching device to anovice teacher. As we see in 18, teachers sometimesrequest direct advice. We know that beginningteachers will vary in their level of dependency orautonomy (Achinstein & Villar, 2002) and suchindividual differences require support from amentor that is adapted to a specific teacher’sneeds. More dependent, less experienced teachersmay need more direct pedagogical advice fromtheir mentors, and may not benefit as much fromtechniques that rule out direct teaching anddemand that the teachers come up with ideasindependently. To see whether teachers trulyaccept their mentors’ suggestions we need toexamine their actions in the classroom. This lineof inquiry, too, is planned in future work.

5. Conclusion

Through an analysis of mentor/teacher conver-sations, the present study attempts a classificationof suggestions and responses to provide insightinto how mentors give advice and how beginningteachers respond. The analysis reveals the extremeefforts of mentors to avoid giving direct advice,and a corpus that includes many indirect sugges-tions, about one-third of which appear to engagethe beginning teachers, such that they produceelaborated responses. It is suggested that theobserved conversational patterns may be largelyexplained by the philosophy of the program ofwhich the mentors and beginning teachers are apart. Further study with mentors and teachersfrom other programs is called for in order todetermine whether these patterns are typical, andwhether alternate approaches result in similar ordifferent levels of elaborated responses frombeginning teachers. Additional observations ofnovice teachers’ classroom practice will reveal iftheir mentors’ suggestions result in advances intheir pedagogical development.

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Documents

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