Student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring and learning to teach during teaching practice

British Journal of Educational Psychology (2001), 71, 57–80 Printed in Great Britain© 2001 The British Psychological Society

Student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring andlearning to teach during teaching practice

Anneke Zanting* and Nico VerloopICLON, Graduate School of Education, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Jan D. VermuntDepartment of Educational Development and Research, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Background. Various interpretations of mentor roles, by teacher educatorsand mentors, have been described in the literature on mentoring, while thoseof student teachers have received less attention. Therefore, this study focuseson student teachers’ expectations of mentors and their own contributions totheir learning process while they are supervised by a mentor.

Aims. The main aims of this study were: (1) bridging the research on mentor-ing and the research on higher education students’ learning conceptions byinvestigating student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring and learning to teach,and (2) comparing these beliefs to mentors’ ones and recent views on mentor-ing and learning in order to make suggestions for improving learning toteach.

Sample. Thirty student teachers, graduates in various academic disciplines,participated. They were attending a one-year teacher education programme atLeiden University in the Netherlands.

Methods. Structured interviews with the student teachers were audio-taped.Firstly, categories of mentor roles and learning activities were derived fromthe data. These were linked, secondly, by their focus of attention and, thirdly,empirically by a homogeneity analysis (HOMALS).

Results. Six mentor roles, ten learning activities, and one regulation activitywere combined in six foci: (1) affective aspects of learning to teach, (2)mentors’ teaching styles, (3) assessment of student teachers’ performance, (4)re�ecting on students’ lessons, (5) school context, and (6) self-regulation oflearning. The HOMALS analysis yielded a process-product dimension.

Conclusion. In this study, the student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring weresimilar to those of mentors. Furthermore, a third of the student teachersexpected themselves as thinking critically about their lessons, but nobodyexpected their mentors to explicate their practical knowledge underlying theirteaching. Therefore, the articulation of this knowledge is indicated as anadditional mentor role and will be elaborated.

* Requests for reprints should be addressed to Anneke Zanting, ICLON, Graduate School of Education,Leiden University, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands (e-mail: [email protected]).

Teacher education programmes generally include a substantial amount of practicaltraining during which prospective teachers are supervised by experienced classroomteachers. This supervision has always played an important role in learning to teach, butit is becoming even more important as teacher preparation is increasingly beingsituated in the schools rather than higher education institutions. This is the case inseveral countries, including the United Kingdom (Tomlinson, 1995) and the Nether-lands. The present article deals with this guiding role of classroom teachers who serveas ‘mentors’. The prospective teachers will be referred to as ‘student teachers’ or‘students’; the learners in the school classroom as ‘pupils’, and the mentors’ guidance as‘mentoring’.

Mentor rolesSeveral aspects of mentoring and several mentor roles have been described in theliterature. Hawkey (1997) distinguished four themes in the research on mentoring: (a)the speci�c roles and responsibilities of mentors compared to other educators likeuniversity supervisors, (b) models of mentoring and their correspondence with studentteachers’ needs and stages of development, (c) the interpersonal relationship betweenmentor and student teachers, and (d) the idiosyncratic nature of mentoring, resultingfrom the personal perspectives, values, and assumptions that underlie mentors’ teach-ing and mentoring. In the present article, we focus on a mixture of the �rst and thirdthemes, namely, the mentors’ responsibility and roles, including the relationship withtheir students.

In spite of the personal in�uences that shape mentors’ roles, referred to in the fourththeme, some common features of mentoring have been described in the literature. Inshort, mentors should ful�l several roles (e.g., Anderson & Shannon, 1988) such asbeing a model and instructor of students’ teaching (e.g., Maynard & Furlong, 1994), aninformation source for tips and advice (e.g., Hawkey, 1998), a co-enquirer whostimulates students’ re�ections on their own lessons (e.g., Feiman-Nemser & Parker,1993; Maynard & Furlong, 1994; Tomlinson, 1995), an evaluator (e.g., Martin, 1996), achallenger (e.g., Martin, 1996), a provider of an introduction to the teaching world (e.g.,Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1993), and a coach or supporter (e.g., Hawkey, 1998;Tomlinson, 1995). More detailed overviews of mentor roles have been provided byHawkey (1997) and Zanting, Verloop, Vermunt, and Van Driel (1998).

How do mentors themselves interpret their roles? Elliott and Calderhead (1994) andJones, Reid, and Bevins (1997) found that mentors viewed their function as ‘good’ or‘effective’ when it incorporated such practical help as: (a) providing guidance, (b)observing students’ teaching and classroom management, (c) providing feedback, (d)being good listeners or ‘friends’ for whom the mentor-student relationship is mostimportant, (e) modelling and advising on teaching and classroom management, (f)helping with time management, (g) providing encouragement and support, and (h)introducing student teachers to school life. Wright and Bottery (1997) found thatmentors thought their most important tasks were helping students with in-classroomissues such as lesson objectives, planning, classroom management, developing goodrelationships with pupils, and getting the best out of pupils. The great majority of thesementors also felt themselves responsible for evaluating students’ lessons and advisingthem.

58 Anneke Zanting et al.

How mentors or teacher educators interpret the mentor role depends on theirassumptions about student teachers’ learning. Maynard and Furlong (1994) describedthree models of mentoring based on a literature study, the apprenticeship model, thecompetency model, and the re�ective model. In the apprenticeship model, it is assumedthat student teachers learn to teach by observing experienced teachers and gainingteaching experience under their guidance. Student teachers form ideas about theprocess of teaching and acquire some teaching strategies. Mentors mainly ful�l the roleof a model. In the competency model, it is assumed that student teachers learn to teachby systematically practising teaching skills and techniques. Mentors observe the stu-dent teachers and provide feedback. In the re�ective model, it is assumed that studentteachers learn by critically thinking about different ways of teaching. Student teachersgo beyond simply extending their teaching repertoire and develop a deeper under-standing of the process of learning and teaching. In this model, mentors and studentsare co-inquirers.

Although Maynard and Furlong (1994) stressed that these models are not discrete,they described some development by indicating a sequence of the various models.After observing lessons, systematic training of student teachers can start. The studentteachers, subsequently, need to develop critical thinking about different ways ofteaching and a personal teaching style.

Pitfalls and challenges in mentoringThere are some pitfalls in mentoring. According to Martin (1996), mentors are inclinedto stress the interpersonal and supportive aspects of mentoring, whereas students alsoneed evaluation and challenge. Others concluded that when evaluating students,mentors tend to evaluate their teaching performance rather than the thinking behindthe performance (Ben-Peretz & Rumney, 1991; Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1993). Thatis, mentors point out the right and wrong elements in what the students do during theirlessons and provide them with tips and suggestions to make improvements. Mentorsrarely go into the student teachers’ rationale for their actions. Consequently, theevaluation of students’ lessons generally remains restricted to a discussion about the‘how’ of teaching and does not touch on the reasons underlying their actions.

There is another aspect of mentoring that is frequently overlooked, both in theresearch and practice of mentoring: stimulating student teachers to gain access to theirmentors’ practical knowledge by prompting mentors to articulate this knowledge andstudents to ask questions. Several de�nitions of ‘practical knowledge’ or ‘(professional)craft knowledge’ can be found in the literature (Brown & McIntyre, 1995; Carter, 1990;Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992). In this article, we describe practical knowledge as anamalgam of all teachers’ cognitions, such as declarative and procedural knowledge,beliefs and values, and thoughts that in�uence their preactive, interactive, and post-active teaching activities. Practical knowledge can be more or less implicit. Forexample, knowledge about pupils’ general dif�culties with subject matter has beendeveloped in practice. This knowledge can be interpreted as practical knowledge andmay not be dif�cult for the teacher to articulate. On the other hand, a teacher’stendency to present dif�cult maths problems to male pupils instead of female pupilsduring whole-class instruction can be based on an unconscious belief that boys arebetter at maths than girls. It seems that mentors are able to talk about practice in

59Student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring

general terms and to give students feedback and suggestions on the basis of theirteaching experience, but it is hard for them to articulate the thoughts and decisions thatunderlie their own teaching (Brown & McIntyre, 1995; Carter, 1990; Hawkey, 1997).

Stimulating students teachers to gain access to practical knowledge means urgingthem to access the knowledge, beliefs, and considerations underlying their mentors’teaching. This type of inquiry can serve several functions in students’ learning to teach.A few explanatory remarks on these functions will be made. An extensive explanationcan be found in Zanting et al. (1998).

The primary reason for accessing practical knowledge is to understand a mentor’sthinking on teaching. This has to do with the decision-making before, during, and afterthe lessons. These cognitions can make observable teaching more understandablebecause they go beyond the ‘how’ of teaching by also explaining the ‘why’ of teaching(Tomlinson, 1995). Therefore, explicated practical knowledge can provide valuableinformation, in addition to observation of a mentor’s lessons. Furthermore, thesecognitions show the considerations underlying teaching, which are personal andtherefore differ from teacher to teacher. This diversity can show students the complex-ity of teaching. There is not just ‘one way to teach’, because it is personal and situated.Another function is understanding a mentor’s feedback on student teaching. Studentscan better understand and evaluate feedback after having explored the practicalknowledge underlying a mentor’s teaching.

Access to practical knowledge �ts the apprenticeship model of mentoring. A studentteacher can learn from the explication of reasons underlying a mentor’s teaching. It canclarify a mentor’s lessons and also illuminate a teacher’s thinking process in general. Atthe same time, it also �ts the re�ective model. Access to practical knowledge providesstudent teachers with their mentors’ thoughts and re�ections. Student teachers, subse-quently, can compare these to their own beliefs about teaching and re�ect on possiblesimilarities and differences.

Student teachers’ beliefs about mentoringThe mentor roles described above have all been identi�ed either from the perspectiveof researchers and teacher educators or mentors. Fewer studies on mentoring havebeen conducted from the perspective of student teachers. Some researchers (e.g.,Booth, 1993; Brown, 1995; Grimmett & Ratzlaff, 1986) have examined students’expectations regarding their mentors’ roles. For example, the students in the Boothstudy expected their mentors to provide them with general support and encourage-ment, assistance in their professional development, and information and advice onsubject-speci�c teaching, classroom management, and control. Brown (1995) foundthat student teachers were not inclined to ask mentors questions in response tomentors’ lessons. These �ndings mainly reveal the students’ expectations that focus onimproving their performance and refer to the ‘how’ of teaching. They focus less onthinking about why teaching is successful, which is a precondition for understandingteaching.

The present study focused on student teachers’ expectations of their mentors whenlearning to teach, i.e., their beliefs about ‘good’ mentoring, for two reasons. The first isthat there are comparatively few studies on these beliefs of student teachers. The secondreason concerns the ‘missing role’ of the mentors as described in the literature (e.g.,


Edwards & Collison, 1995; Elliott & Calderhead, 1994). This ‘missing role’ refers to thelack of articulation of practical knowledge by mentors, who generally do not perceive thisas a part of their function. In the present study, we examined whether student teachersperceive the articulation of practical knowledge as one of the mentor roles.

Student teachers’ beliefs about learning to teachThe present study also evaluated student teachers’ expectations of themselves whenbeing supervised by a mentor. These expectations reveal how students perceive theirown learning when a mentor is available, e.g., as a process of observing and imitating amentor’s lesson, as trial-and-error, or as carefully planning lessons and rethinking themafterwards. Investigating student teachers’ interpretations of their own learning hasreceived little attention in the research, which mostly involves students of highereducation in general (e.g., Lonka & Lindblom-Ylänne, 1996; Marton, Dall’ Alba, &Beaty, 1993; Tynjälä, 1997; Vermunt, 1998; Vermetten, 1999; Vermetten, Vermunt, &Lodewijks, 1999).

Therefore, in the present study, the students’ interpretations of beliefs about theirown learning were investigated in the context of practice teaching. These beliefs can beconceived as a part of a learning conception because these clarify their interpretation oftheir own learning (see Vermunt, 1996). Thus, a new aspect of the present study is thecombination of the research on teacher education with the research in higher educationon students’ learning conceptions. Vermunt and Verloop (1999) have contributed tothe integration of both research programmes on a theoretical level by combiningtheories of learning and teaching. In this report, we extend this to the empirical level byinvestigating student teachers’ beliefs about their own learning when a mentor isavailable.

This combination of the research on learning and on teacher education also emergedfrom the regulation perspective included in the present study. The regulation oflearning processes has been a theme of research in higher education in general. Thisregulation �ts a cognitive psychological view on learning and teaching (e.g., Boekaerts,1997; Simons & Lodewijks, 1987; Vermunt, 1998). In this view, learning is interpretedas an active, constructive, and self-directed process instead of a passive, knowledge-consuming, and externally directed process. Learners construct their personalknowledge and understanding.

Intentional learning does not take place automatically. Learners undertake learningactivities in order to extend or adjust their knowledge and understanding. Learningoutcomes depend on the quality of the learning activities. For example, when recall ofinformation is strived for, the learning activity ‘memorising’ is satisfactory. To come tounderstanding, other learning activities are required, such as relating and structuringthe information. In this view on learning, teachers should stimulate learners to be activeand develop learning activities in order to learn. In the present study, we agreed withthis view on learning and teaching. It was assumed that in an educational context liketeacher education, student teachers should not be passive consumers of books ormentors’ suggestions.

The following examples illustrate two components of learning that were of particularinterest in the present study: learning activities and the regulation of learning. When astudent teacher makes a lesson plan, these activities are accompanied by intangible


mental or cognitive learning activities (Vermunt, 1996). Particularly, when learning tomake a lesson plan, these learning activities include analysing the teaching situation(pupils, subject matter, lesson goal, time of day), structuring the lesson, relating thesubject matter to the pupils’ prior knowledge, and concretising the subject matter forthe pupils with the aid of examples, metaphors, or personal experiences.

Learners also have to regulate their learning activities which include planning theactivities, monitoring the learning process, diagnosing problems and failures, evaluat-ing learning outcomes, and re�ecting on the learning process and product. In thecontext of the student teachers’ practical training, several regulative activities have tobe applied. In order to learn from their teaching experiences, student teachers have tore�ect on the lessons given, to diagnose weak points and their causes. This re�ectioncan lead to new ideas and intentions for future lessons. When these lessons are actuallygiven, student teachers have to monitor whether they are really applying their newinsights or relapsing into their old patterns.

Learning and regulation activities can be initiated by student teachers themselves. Inthat case, the learning process is regulated internally, or is ‘self-regulated’ (Vermunt,1996). However, mentors can also encourage student teachers to develop and evenperform these activities instead of the students. The learning process is then regulatedexternally by the mentor. When both student and mentor regulate learning, this iscalled ‘shared’ control. Regulation of learning has been extensively studied in theresearch on learning in higher education in general, but less so in teacher education(e.g., Entwistle, 1988; Marton, 1988; Pask, 1976; Schmeck, 1983; Schmeck, Geisler-Brenstein, & Cercy, 1991). Nowadays, policy makers and educators are increasinglystriving for an increase of self-regulation by the learner and a decrease of externalregulation by the teacher (Boekaerts, 1997).

Research questionsThe focus of the present study was on student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring andtheir own learning, including the dimension of the regulation of learning. The severalmentor roles and the different ways of regulation inspired the two research questions:a) What beliefs do student teachers have about ‘good’ mentoring; and (b) What beliefsdo student teachers have about their own responsibilities and contributions to theirlearning-to-teach process when being supervised by a mentor?

Method

ContextThe student teachers in this study were attending a postgraduate teacher educationprogramme at Leiden University in the Netherlands. The one-year teacher trainingcourse consisted of both theoretical and practical components, which were alternated.During the theoretical module, student teachers acquired knowledge about teachingmethods and educational theory, and they practised their teaching skills at the teachereducation institute. During their practical training in the classrooms, student teachersobserved lessons given by their mentors, had the opportunity to give lessonsthemselves, and discussed these lessons with their mentors. The students received theirpractical training at two different schools. They were being trained to teach at the high


school level (pupil age 15–18) in one speci�c subject area of language (Dutch, English,German, French, classics), science (mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry), or socialscience (history, art history, social studies).

ParticipantsThirty student teachers, 11 males and 19 females, participated on a voluntary basis.They were recruited via letters and subsequent phone calls. The response rate was 88%of 34 student teachers. Lack of time was the main reason given for not participating.The participants were interviewed during their second practical training period andcould therefore answer questions about two mentors. However, one female studentwas offered a job during the teacher training course and participated in only onepractical training module. Therefore, she was excluded from the data analysis. Theother 29 student teachers were, on average, 27 years old (SD = 3). The division of thesestudents into the three main subject areas in the sample closely represented the divisionof the population of the 60 full-time student teachers during the 1995–1996 academicyear. In this population, 31 student teachers (52%) had studied languages, 18 of them(30%) had studied science, and 11 (18%) social science. In the sample, 17 (59%)student teachers had studied languages, 7 (24%) of them science, and 5 (17%) of themsocial science.

Interview scheduleThe student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring and their own learning were investigatedwith structured interviews. The two research questions addressed in the present studywere embedded in an overall study on student teachers’ experiences with mentoring.The interviews were guided by a �xed interview scheme of questions concerningseveral aspects of mentoring, such as the frequency and content of mentor-studentconversations (e.g., Did you discuss your lessons with your mentor? What was positivein your conversations with your mentor? Would you like these conversations to havebeen different? In what way?). Thus, the student teachers evaluated the roles theirmentors had actually ful�lled, according to their perceptions.

In the present study, the students’ beliefs concerning their mentors’ contributions totheir learning process were investigated (e.g., What does ‘good’ mentoring mean toyou? What do you want to learn from a mentor?). The students’ beliefs concerningtheir own responsibility for their learning-to-teach process were investigated too (e.g.,What do you think you are supposed to do in order to learn from a mentor?). Thesequestions did not focus on the actual experienced role of the mentors, but on what thestudents thought desirable. Of course, this may have been in�uenced by the studentteachers’ actual experiences with their mentors.

Before interviewing the student teachers, the interview schedule was tried out onother students from the same teacher education institute who did not participate in theactual study. On the basis of the trial interviews, some questions were added or restatedin a more transparent way. In some cases, the sequence of the questions was changed toimprove the structure of the interview.

ProcedureAll student teachers were interviewed in a separate and quiet room at the teachereducation institute by the same interviewer, who was not a member of the teaching


staff. Before the interviews, student teachers were informed about the goal (�nding outstudents’ experiences with and expectations of mentoring), signi�cance (optimising thepractical training), and procedure of the interview (working with an interview sched-ule). They were reassured that the interviews were unrelated to any form of evaluationand that they would remain anonymous. The entire interview lasted an average of 75minutes. All interviews were audio-taped.

Data analysisThe data were analysed in three stages. Firstly, categories describing mentor roles andstudent learning activities were derived from the data. Secondly, these categories werelogically arranged in groups on the basis of their focus of attention. Thirdly, possiblerelations between the categories were empirically explored with a homogeneity analysis.

Phenomenographic analysis. The categories were developed systematically inresponse to the data, i.e., the development of the categories and the study of the datawere alternated and intertwined. This procedure can be associated with the ‘groundedtheory’ approach in which the continual cycling back between developing categories ortheory construction and examination of the data is stressed (Strauss, 1987). Because theresearch questions in the present study focused on the students’ beliefs as part of theirlearning conceptions and no �eld data were used, we prefer the term ‘phenomeno-graphic analysis’ (Miles & Huberman, 1994). In this approach, the researcher describesqualitatively the different ways that people experience or think about various phenom-ena by means of different qualitative categories (see Marton, 1986, 1990).

Linking the categories. The analysis of all the interviews provided an enumerativedescription of mentor roles and student learning activities, such as the mentor role‘coach’ or ‘evaluator’ and the student activity ‘observing a mentor’s lesson’ or ‘experi-menting with new teaching situations’. This enumeration of mentor roles and studentlearning activities was not just a convenient arrangement of the student teachers’beliefs. Therefore, links between the categories were explored by comparing them andlooking for meaningful clusters (see Miles & Huberman, 1994). What seemed mean-ingful to us will be described in the second data-analysis phase.

HOMALS. Because of the exploratory character of the study and the binomial natureof the data, we used homogeneity analysis by means of alternating least squares(HOMALS). HOMALS was developed by the Department of Data Theory of theUniversity of Leiden. It is also known as multiple correspondence analysis and can beviewed as a principal component analysis of nominal data. With HOMALS, the relation-ships between nominal variables can be described in a low-dimensional space and, in thisway, the underlying structure of the variables can be revealed. In this space, the variablesare not plotted, but rather the categories of a variable. The ‘cases’ or ‘respondents’, namedthe ‘object scores’, are plotted in the same space. Each category is plotted in the centre ofthe group of objects that belong to that category in such a way that the total distance is assmall as possible. At the same time, the distances between the categories are maximised.In this way, the correspondence between the categories is described by distance. Thecategories that are similar are plotted close to each other, while those with less similarityare plotted far apart. Objects with the same answer patterns, i.e., pattern of the categoriesscored, are located close to each other. Thus, proximity is a measure of correspondence,and distance one of difference in HOMALS.


A more technical description of HOMALS is given by Gi� (1990). A shorterexplanation can be found in the SPSS manual (e.g., SPSS, 1990). In the present analysis,HOMALS was run as a procedure of the package SPPS 8.0 for Windows (SPSS,1997).

In order to facilitate their grasp, the data analysis and results will be describedalternately by phase.

Data analysis phase 1: Developing the categories

Nineteen interviews were transcribed verbatim. First of all, a portion of �ve interviewtranscripts were analysed thoroughly. Passages relevant to the two research questionswere selected. The interview questions elicited the student teachers’ descriptions of a‘good’ mentor and actions they expected from themselves when being supervised by amentor. These were organised into two main categories: mentor roles and learningactivities. The latter are activities that people employ to learn.

The selected statements of individual students were compared for similarities anddifferences across individuals which led to the formulation of categories. After devel-oping categories from the �rst �ve transcripts, a new set of interviews was studied and,where necessary, the categories were adjusted. In this way, interviews with 19 studentteachers (9 males and 10 females) were analysed. During the analysis, no new cate-gories were generated and eventually saturation was reached. The last 10 interviewswere analysed to validate the categories. These interviews were not transcribedverbatim and were analysed when playing back the tape. In this second round ofanalysis, it appeared that the categories could be applied to the interviews on the tape,and that all coding units could be classi�ed with the categories developed.

After validation of the categories, the inter-rater reliability was determined. Theinterviews had been encoded by one rater, who had also been the interviewer and haddeveloped the categories. The units of coding were identi�ed by the �rst rater on thebasis of their content. When a student teacher started to talk about a subject thatbelonged to a new category, a new coding unit was created. The units covered all thecategories developed. After the coding of 117 units of the verbatim transcripts by the�rst rater, these units were encoded by a second rater. Before the second rating, thecoding system had been studied by the second rater and, if necessary, clari�ed by the�rst. This procedure resulted in an inter-rater reliability of .86 (observed proportion ofagreement, corrected for the agreement expected by chance). All categories were usedin this double coding. Because the inter-rater reliability was highly acceptable, thecategories were established. These categories were mutually exclusive, i.e., everycoding unit only �tted in one of them. However, students could have mentioned severalmentor roles or learning activities. Thus, one transcript could be described by morethan one subcategory re�ecting a mentor role or a learning activity.

Results phase 1: The categories

In total, a mentoring role was mentioned 83 times and a student learning activity 52times. These are the frequencies found in the 29 interviews. Thus, an individual studentcould have mentioned more than one mentor role or student activity. The analysis


resulted in �ve expected mentor roles. The sixth category was of a different order andput the role of a mentor in perspective. Ten different learning activities and oneregulative activity emerged from the data. These are summarised as categories in thesecond and third columns of Table 1 and will be described and illustrated in the nextresults section.

Data analysis phase 2: Linking the categories

In the second phase, we looked for meaningful groups of categories (Miles & Huber-man, 1994). It appeared that the expectations about the mentor roles and studentteachers’ learning activities focused on speci�c aspects of learning to teach, such asimproving a student’s own lessons or getting acquainted with the school context. Wecalled this focus a student teacher’s ‘focus of attention’. The various mentor roles andstudents’ learning activities were sorted manually on the basis of six foci (see Table1).

We conceived the focus of attention as comparable to the concept ‘learning orienta-tion’ described by Vermunt (1996). Learning orientations are intentions or personalobjectives, such as a performance-oriented motivation or a meaningful-oriented moti-vation. Vermunt’s performance-oriented motivation corresponds, for example, to thestudent teachers’ focus on the assessment of their teaching performance (see Table 1).When this was the orientation, the student teachers expected their mentors to evaluatetheir lessons and thought that they had to undertake action in response to theirmentors’ feedback. Vermunt’s (1996) meaningful-oriented motivation corresponds to afocus of attention on the student teachers’ re�ection on their lessons. The studentteachers expected their mentors to stimulate them to think critically about their ownlessons. They were then of the opinion that they had to think critically about theirlessons and to indicate the strengths and weaknesses.

The sorting of the categories was based on the interpretation of the researcher. Anempirical analysis will be described in the third phase of the analysis. The sortingresulted in six foci of attention: (a) the affective aspects of learning to teach, (b) amentor’s teaching style, (c) assessment of a student’s teaching performance, (d)re�ecting on a student teacher’s lessons, (e) the school context, and (f) the self-regulation of learning to teach.

Results phase 2: Links between the categories

Table 1 shows six foci, six mentor roles, ten student learning activities, and one studentregulative activity. We emphasise that the distinct rows do not represent individualstudent teachers, but a focus referred to when mentioning mentor roles or learningactivities. An individual student would not necessarily have mentioned all componentsof a focus, but could have mentioned several mentor roles or learning activities eachbelonging to several foci. The data showed that most students expected their mentor toplay several roles. Only �ve explicitly restricted themselves to one speci�c role, that ofcoach or evaluator. Furthermore, a student could feel responsible for the learningactivity ‘discussing lessons with the mentor’, but also for ‘attending staff meetings andschool activities’, while not having mentioned the mentor role of this focus: ‘introduc-


Tab

le 1

.M

ento

r ro

les

(6),

stu

dent

tea

cher

lea

rnin

g ac

tivi

ties

(10

), a

nd a

stu

dent

reg

ulat

ion

acti

vity

, or

gani

sed

by s

ix f

oci

ofat

tent

ion

Foc

us (

N=

5)M

ento

r ro

le (

N=

72)

Stud

ent

lear

ning

act

ivit

y (N

=52

)

�th

e af

fect

ive

aspe

cts

of le

arni

ngto

tea

ch�

coac

h: g

ivin

g st

uden

t te

ache

rs e

mot

iona

l sup

port

,be

ing

‘fri

ends

’, en

cour

angi

ng, e

tc. (

21)

�es

tabl

ishi

ng a

nd m

aint

aini

ng a

goo

d re

lati

onsh

ipw

ith

a m

ento

r by

acc

epti

ng a

nd r

espe

ctin

g hi

m/

her

(14)

�re

gula

ting

fee

lings

elic

ited

by

teac

hing

exp

erie

n-ce

s or

by

bein

g su

perv

ised

, e.g

., de

alin

g w

ith

crit

icis

m (

3)�

bein

g �e

xibl

e: e

xper

imen

ting

wit

h ne

w t

each

ing

situ

atio

ns (

4)

�a

men

tor’

s te

achi

ng s

tyle

�in

form

atio

n so

urce

: pro

vidi

ng t

ips,

adv

ice

and

sugg

esti

ons

(15)

�ob

serv

ing

a m

ento

r’s

less

ons

(5)

�as

king

‘why

que

stio

ns’ i

n re

spon

se t

o th

e ob

ser-

vati

ons

of le

sson

s (5

)�

aski

ng q

uest

ions

in p

repa

rati

on o

f a

stud

ent’

s le

s-so

ns o

r in

res

pons

e to

exp

erie

nced

tea

chin

gsi

tuat

ions

(4)

�as

sess

men

t of

a s

tude

nt t

each

er’s

perf

orm

ance

�ev

alua

tor

of a

stu

dent

’s le

sson

s (1

9)�

disc

ussi

ng le

sson

s w

ith

a m

ento

r (2

)

�un

dert

akin

g ac

tion

in r

espo

nse

to a

men

tor’

sfe

edba

ck (

5)

�re

�ect

ion

on a

stu

dent

tea

cher

’sle

sson

s�

som

eone

who

sti

mul

ates

a s

tude

nt t

each

er t

oth

ink

abou

t hi

s/he

r ow

n te

achi

ng (

11)

�th

inki

ng c

riti

cally

abo

ut o

ne’s

less

ons,

indi

cati

ngth

e st

reng

ths

and

wea

knes

s of

one

’s t

each

ing,

the

caus

es, a

nd p

ossi

ble

solu

tion

s (7

)

�th

e sc

hool

con

text

�so

meo

ne w

ho in

trod

uces

a s

tude

nt t

each

er t

osc

hool

life

(6)

�at

tend

ing

staf

f m

eeti

ngs

and

scho

ol a

ctiv

itie

s an

dta

lkin

g w

ith

(men

tor)

tea

cher

s at

the

sch

ool (

3)

Foc

us (

N=

1)P

utti

ng t

he m

ento

r ro

le in

per

spec

tive

(N=

11)

Stud

ent

regu

lati

on a

ctiv

ity (

N=

11)

�th

e se

lf-r

egul

atin

g of

lear

ning

�th

e m

ento

r is

not

the

onl

y ro

le m

odel

for

tea

ch-

ing

(11)

�ta

king

init

iati

ve: p

rese

ntin

g qu

esti

ons

and

prob

-le

ms

to a

men

tor,

indi

cati

ng p

oint

s fo

r le

sson

sdi

scus

sion

s, s

peak

up,

etc

. (11

)


ing a student teacher to school life’. In the following section, the mentor roles andstudent learning activities will be described per focus. The regulation of the students’learning process will be included.

Focus on the affective aspects of learning to teachIn this focus, the mentor ful�ls the role of a coach. We de�ne this as a ‘coach of evokedemotions’. In fact, 72% of the student teachers (21) expected their mentors to givethem this emotional support. As coaches, mentors do not focus primarily on the actualperformances of their students, in other words, on the learning product. They concen-trate on the affective aspects of learning to teach by guiding the students’ learningexperiences.

The students wanted opportunities to let off steam and to express their concerns,doubts, and worries. The mentor should support them by encouraging or putting thestudents’ nasty teaching experiences in perspective. The students attached greatimportance to honesty, safety, respect, empathy, and the personal involvement of thementors. They also expected their mentors to possess a variety of conversation skillssuch as listening, questioning, introducing items to be discussed, and summarising.

Half of the student teachers (14) expected to establish a good relationship with amentor by being cooperative and honest. This is manifested by listening to a mentorand accepting and respecting a mentor’s personality, beliefs, and views. Besides, earlyteaching experiences can go together with fear of failure and fear of dealing with newand unpredictable situations. Student teachers can also feel threatened by theirmentor’s feedback. These negative feelings can inhibit the learning-to-teach process.Managing these frustrations in a constructive way can be perceived as one of thementors’ tasks or as the students’ responsibility. Three students expected themselves totake a positive stance, to accept mistakes, and to realise that they were not yet able toteach the way experienced teachers do. They recognised the value of mistakes byperceiving them as opportunities to learn. They felt that they ought to be receptive totheir mentors’ criticism, not to be too irritated or thin-skinned. Ultimately, fourstudents emphasised the importance of being open-minded and receptive to new ideas,other ways of teaching, and new experiences. Alexander, a student teacher of German,said:

Anyhow, I think that it is very important when you want to learn something . . . thatyou are �exible. That you don’t hold too strictly to one particular way of teaching.Such as: ‘I give this lesson in this way and I don’t depart from it.’ I think that’s allthere is to it in education . . . You have to be able to adapt to all kinds of situations(ST 19).

Focus on mentor teaching styleMentors can inform students about subject matter, teaching methods, pupils, inter-action with pupils, and coping with problematic situations. Half of the student teachers(15) wished to ‘share’ their mentors’ experiential knowledge and to make use of theirteaching repertoire, i.e., the range of teaching strategies that they mastered and canapply in speci�c teaching situations. They expected their mentors to be ‘informationsources’ and to provide them with rules of thumb and advice. For example, Michael, astudent teacher of Dutch, wanted to learn: ‘How you can link a certain amount of


information from a textbook or the curriculum or a certain subject to teaching methodsthat are attractive to pupils, because I think that my teaching repertoire is often toolimited’ (ST 12).

Mentors can be an information source by spontaneously telling student teachers howto teach. However, students also mentioned learning activities they had performed inorder to get this information, for example, observing mentors’ lessons. Other learningactivities included either presenting questions or descriptions of experienced teachingevents to their mentors.

In �ve cases, students went beyond the ‘how’ of teaching by focusing on the questionwhy mentors teach the way they do. This leads to an exploration of the underlyingthinking, considerations, and decisions of mentors’ lessons, as mentioned by Stephen, astudent teacher of classics. He expected himself to adopt a critical attitude towards hisown role as a teacher and that of his mentor:

I ask him why he, at a certain point, did one thing and not the other . . . you are alsogiving that lesson for yourself, and when you see something happen, you think: ‘Ishould have done that another way’ or ‘I had not expected this’. Then you just want toknow why he did it then . . . A lot of decisions, in inverted commas, are not madeconsciously by a mentor. Not that he thinks: ‘I have a few options and which one shallI choose?’ . . . However, an explanation can often be given for it afterwards (ST 14).

This questioning requires the self-regulation of the learning process. Although �vestudents expected themselves to analyse mentors’ lessons, none of them mentioned arole in which the mentors make explicit their considerations and arguments underlyingthe choices in their teaching. We will explore this as a ‘missing’ role of the mentor in thediscussion section.

Focus on the assessment of a student’s teaching performanceTwo-thirds of the students (19) expected their mentors to evaluate their lessons, i.e., tospecify the strong and weak points of students’ lessons, diagnose the causes of successand failure, and make suggestions to improve the lessons. Students could then take theinitiative to improve their lessons. Mentors should emphasise the strong points in orderto strengthen their self-con�dence. If focusing on the strong points resulted in a ‘peptalk’, mentors were acting as coaches, as described earlier. As coaches, they emphasisethe affective aspects of the process of students’ learning. As evaluators, they emphasisethe professional aspects of learning by assessing their teaching performance.

The transfer of the mentors’ knowledge and beliefs about teaching to their studentteachers was characteristic of their role as evaluators. However, the emphasis can alsobe on the students’ critical thinking about their lessons. This is described by the nextfocus.

Reflecting on the student teacher’s lessonsThe goal of more than a third of the students (11) was not only just to teach a ‘good’lesson. They also wanted to learn from their success and failure. Thus, their learningprocess was at least as important to them as the outcome. These students perceivedthemselves as learners. They did not expect their mentors just to give their views or tooffer suggestions for their lessons; they were there to stimulate them to think critically


about their own lessons by asking speci�c questions. Anne, a student teacher ofGerman, experienced the guidance of her mentor as positive because, at the start of herpractice training, he had questioned all her activities:

‘Why did you do it that way?’ ‘How was it?’ And if you were not satis�ed, ‘Why not?’and ‘What alternatives do you have?’ So, nothing was prescribed. Really, it was likebeing forced to think about your actions and decisions yourself. And, if you did not�gure out the problem, he said: ‘Perhaps, you could do it this way. What do youthink?’ But always in the form of a suggestion (ST 21).

When mentors invited their students to think about their teaching, they analysed thelessons themselves, diagnosing their weak points and �nding possible solutions. Itseems that this analysis was too much to do independently. Thus, when students werefocused on re�ection, the regulation was shared by both students and mentors.

Focus on the school contextAnother focus implied learning within the broader school context. A minority of sixstudent teachers expected their mentors to introduce them to school life, whichincluded introducing them to colleagues, informing them about practical issues andprocedures, such as school rules for pupils, school customs, the availability of teachingmaterials, and so on. Furthermore, mentors were expected to inform students aboutagreements within the department about the subject matter and tests and could invitethem to attend staff meetings or workshops. Mentors could also tell student teachersabout education in general: school organisation, educational objectives, textbooks, orschool-leaving examination requirements.

Three students indicated that they undertook learning activities in order to acquireknowledge of the school context such as the educational goals, curriculum, schoolorganisation, or pupil counselling. For example, they attended staff or subject depart-ment meetings, had conversations with other teachers at the school, or examinedtextbooks. These activities show the initiative of the students who are then learning ina self-regulated way.

Focus on the self-regulation of learning to teachSome students in this study referred explicitly to the regulation of their learning-to-teach process, which they often called ‘taking the initiative’. In so doing, they did notprimarily refer to a learning activity. However, regulation and learning activities areintertwined because the regulation always has a content, for example, a question,problem, or suggestion brought up by a mentor or a student. Lisa, a student teacher ofDutch, stated:

You don’t have to adopt an expectant attitude, like ‘he teaches me everything.’ Youhave to indicate what you want to learn. Making suggestions . . . I think that thelearning effects depend to a great extent on you, your attitude (ST 10).

Furthermore, some students who talked about self-regulation expected more fromthemselves and less external regulation from the mentors during their practical train-ing. This attitude �ts with the interpretation of the mentor role as ‘not just the onlymodel for teaching’, mentioned by more than a third of the student teachers (11). They


spontaneously argued that they were not willing to imitate their mentor’s way ofteaching. They wished to build on their own teaching ideas and develop their ownteaching styles.

Data analysis phase 3: Homogeneity Analysis (HOMALS)

In the second phase of the analysis, the categories were grouped on the basis ofmeaningful foci, and the relations between the categories were not directly derivedfrom the data. In the third phase, we explored possible empirically based relations.

The data were binomial. We coded whether a student had referred to a subcategory(code = 1) or not (code = 0). We did not code how often or how extensively a studenttalked about one of the categories, because our research interest was primarily indescribing different beliefs about ‘good’ mentoring and their own learning on the basisof students’ expositions. We did not intend to compare the students based on thefrequency of categories mentioned.

The categories that were rarely mentioned were excluded from the analysis, sincethey dominated the solution too much. A HOMALS describes the differences andsimilarities of categories. Exceptional categories can blow up the plot and undo thedifferences between the other categories. This effect appeared in a trial analysis.Therefore, categories mentioned by fewer than �ve students were excluded. This wasthe case for the activities: ‘regulating feelings elicited by teaching experiences or bybeing supervised’, ‘being �exible: experimenting’, ‘asking questions before or afterlessons given’, ‘discussing lessons with a mentor’, and ‘attending staff meetings andschool activities’.

The HOMALS was run with all categories of the mentor roles (coach, informationsource, evaluator, stimulating a student’s thinking, introducing to school life, andputting a mentor in perspective [see Table 1]). The following student activities wereinvolved: establishing a good relation with the mentor, observing his/her lessons, asking‘why-questions’ in response, thinking about personal teaching, taking action on amentor’s feedback, and self-regulating the learning process.

Results phase 3: Empirical relations between categories

The HOMALS yielded a two-dimensional solution with eigenvalues of .213 and .169summing to a total �t of .381. An eigenvalue of HOMALS re�ects the mean discrimina-tion measure per dimension and has a maximum of 1.00. It cannot be viewed as theproportion of explained variance as is the case in PCA or factor analysis. Theeigenvalues of HOMALS can therefore seem rather low while the analysis can bemeaningful and interpretative. In the present solution, the eigenvalue of the �rstdimension was rather low (.213) because three items loaded on this dimension, whilethe others did not. Nevertheless, a clear pattern was distinguished and the solution ismeaningful.

Interpretation of the clustersThe analysis divided the categories into three groups. One group loaded on the �rstdimension: the mentor roles ‘coach’ and ‘evaluator’ and the student activity: ‘self-


regulating the learning process’. A second group loaded on the second dimension:‘putting the mentor role in perspective’ and the student activities ‘observing a mentor’slessons’, ‘asking why-questions in response’ and ‘thinking about own lessons’. Theother categories did not discriminate on either dimension. Their loadings were less than.300 (see Table 2).

The categories were plotted in a two-dimensional space (see Figure 1). The cate-gories with the value ‘0’, i.e., the mentor role or student activity was not mentioned, areindicated with a marker and the number ‘0’. The positions of the value ‘1’, i.e., thementor role or student activity was mentioned, are indicated with a marker and anabbreviation of the mentor role or student activity (see legend, Figure 1).

The underlying structure of the data can be described as follows. Firstly, one groupof variables was located rather far from the other. These were the student activities‘observing a mentor’s lessons’, ‘asking why-questions in response’, and ‘thinking aboutown lessons’. These categories have much in common and have less correspondencewith the other ones. The distinctive feature is that they were referred to only a fewtimes by the students.

Secondly, the mentor role of a coach, putting the mentor role in perspective, and thestudent activity of establishing a good relation with a mentor, were plotted close to eachother and, thus, have much in common. This connection could be clari�ed by somecrosstabs (see Table 3). Twelve of the 29 students mentioned both the role of a coachand the student activity of establishing a good relation with the mentor. All the students(11) who put the mentor role in perspective also mentioned the role of a coach.

Thirdly, the roles of information source and evaluator and the student activity of self-regulating the learning process were plotted close to each other. Table 4 shows howthese categories overlap. Thirteen students mentioned both mentor roles and 10

Table 2. Category loadings on the two dimensions of a HOMALS solution

Category Dimension 1 Dimension 2

Mentor roleCoaching a student teacher, giving support .492 .170Being an information source, giving tips and advice .279 .029Evaluating a student teacher’s lessons .592 .005Stimulating a student teacher to think about own lessons

given.069 .014

Introducing a student teacher to school life .169 .198Putting the mentor role in perspective .178 .362

Student learning activityEstablishing and maintaining a good relationship with a

mentor.031 .086

Observing a mentor’s lessons .001 .372Asking ‘why questions’ in response to observations .090 .443Undertaking action in response to a mentor’s feedback .232 .000Thinking critically about one’s lessons .001 .316Self-regulating of the learning process, taking initiative .417 .028

Categories with loadings > 300 in bold


mentioned the evaluating role and self-regulation. These students were active in askingfor information or feedback, instead of being passive receivers.

Interpretation of the dimensionsThe �rst dimension of the plot can be interpreted as a process-product dimension (seeFigure 1.). The categories on the right of the dimension focus on learning outcomes.The mentor as an information source or evaluator gives concrete tips and suggestionsor corrections. When introducing to school life, the mentor mentions practical informa-tion, e.g., school rules, the location of the staff room and classrooms. The studentteachers then get concrete information.

Figure 1. Category quanti�cations of a two-dimensional HOMALS solution


Tab

le 3

.F

requ

enci

es o

f th

e m

ento

r ro

le ‘c

oach

’ and

tw

o st

uden

t ac

tivi

ties

Est

ablis

hing

a g

ood

rela

tion

ship

wit

h a

men

tor

Put

ting

the

men

tor

role

in p

ersp

ecti

ve0

(not

men

tion

ed)

1 (m

enti

oned

)T

otal

0 (n

ot m

enti

oned

)1

(men

tion

ed)

Tot

al

Men

tor

as a

coa

ch0

(not

men

tion

ed)

62

88

08

1 (m

enti

oned

)9

12

2110

1121

Tot

al15

1429

1811

29

Tab

le 4

.F

requ

enci

es o

f th

e m

ento

r ro

le ‘

eval

uato

r’,

the

role

‘in

form

atio

n so

urce

’, an

d st

uden

t ac

tivi

ty ‘

self

-reg

ulat

ing

the

lear

ning

pro

cess

’

Men

tor

as a

n in

form

atio

n so

urce

Self

-reg

ulat

ion

of t

he le

arni

ng p

roce

ss0

(not

men

tion

ed)

1 (m

enti

oned

)T

otal

0 (n

ot m

enti

oned

)1

(men

tion

ed)

Tot

al

Men

tor

as e

valu

ator

0 (n

ot m

enti

oned

)8

614

91

10

1 (m

enti

oned

)2

1315

910

19T

otal

1019

2918

1129


The categories on the left are more process-oriented. As a coach, mentors focus onthe affective aspects of the learning process, while students who establish good relationswith their mentors do the same. In stimulating students to think about teaching,mentors focus on students’ thinking or reflection processes. When putting the mentor inperspective, students stress the process of developing a personal teaching style. Thesementor roles and this student activity do not provide students with immediatelyapplicable information.

The second dimension is harder to interpret. One possible, meaningful interpretationcan be the ascribed signi�cance of the mentor role. At the ‘bottom’ of the seconddimension, the mentor role is put in perspective by the students. They indicated thatthey wanted to make their own decisions. Around the zero-point, the role of coach,information source, and evaluator were plotted. The students expected these roles, butalso expected to use their own initiative in asking questions or presenting problems.When stimulating students to think about teaching, the mentors become more impor-tant. Eleven students indicated that they need stimulation in order to think about theirown lessons. The student activities ‘observing a mentor’s lessons’ and ‘asking why-questions in response to these’ cannot be undertaken without a mentor. Therefore,these categories are printed at the top of the second dimension: the mentor isindispensable. Remember that more categories are plotted at the bottom or the middleof the dimension than at the top.

Discussion

The research questions addressed in this study were: (a) What beliefs do studentteachers have about ‘good’ mentoring? and (b) What beliefs do student teachers haveabout their own responsibilities and contributions to their learning-to-teach processwhen being supervised by a mentor? Six interpretations of mentor roles, ten studentlearning activities, and one explicit student regulation activity emerged from the data(see Table 1). These categories revealed what student teachers expected of theirmentors and themselves during practical training. Furthermore, by investigating stu-dents’ own learning and the role of mentors, we have tried to contribute to theintegration of research on teacher education with research on learning. The categorieswere combined in six foci: (1) the affective aspects of learning to teach, (2) a mentor’steaching style, (3) assessment of a student teachers’ performance, (4) re�ecting on astudent teacher’s lessons, (5) the school context, and (6) the self-regulation of learn-ing.

Student and mentor beliefs about mentoringIt is worth noting that, in the present study, the students’ expectations of their mentorswere very similar to the role interpretations of mentors themselves, teacher educators,and educational researchers that were described in the introduction. For example, moststudents expected their mentors to play several roles. The mentors themselves alsoperceived ‘good mentoring’ as the ful�lment of several functions (Jones et al., 1997;Wright & Bottery, 1997). This is also consistent with the literature on mentoring(Anderson & Shannon, 1988; Tomlinson, 1995).

Some beliefs about mentoring were more prevalent than others. Most studentsexpected them to be coaches. This �ts the mentors’ emphasis on being supportive and


establishing a good relationship with their students (Elliott & Calderhead, 1994; Joneset al., 1997; Martin, 1996). This coaching role has also been considered of greatimportance by student teachers in other studies (e.g., Booth, 1993) and in models ofmentoring (e.g., Anderson & Shannon, 1988). Therefore, there could be a danger thatthe supportive role unjustly diminishes the other mentor roles. Although the coachingrole is vital, Martin (1996) stated that student teachers also need to be evaluated andchallenged. This seems to be what most of the students (19) in this study wanted. Theymentioned the evaluative role of their ‘ideal’ mentors.

This does not mean the students just wanted to be told the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ oftheir lessons. Approximately one-third of them wished to discover these themselves,but with their mentors to guide them. It is remarkable that this initiating role wasdistinguished by the students in this study, whereas the literature on mentoringindicates that mentors themselves tend to get stuck evaluating teaching performancerather than stressing re�ection on teaching (Ben-Peretz & Rumney, 1991; Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1993). Therefore mentors tend to focus on the observable teachingof what works: the ‘how’ of teaching. In so doing, they can forget to analyse lessons andto think about why a teaching action was successful or not. Helping to analyse andre�ect on teaching is one of the basic functions of mentoring (Tomlinson, 1995).Rethinking the teaching process and outcomes corresponds with the well-knownre�ection-on-action described by Schön (1987). It is not clear whether the students whodid not expect to be stimulated to think critically actually did so without this prompt-ing.

Another mentor role involves informing student teachers about life in the classroom,a point mentioned by at least half of the students. This corresponds with mentors’interpretations of mentoring as giving experience, modelling teaching and advising(Jones et al., 1997; Wright & Bottery, 1997). Corresponding learning activities areobserving the mentor’s teaching style and making use of tips and advice. In this way,students focus on ‘how’ others teach.

A few student teachers in this study went deeper and expected themselves to analysethe reasoning behind a mentor’s teaching style. In the HOMALS analysis, this activitywas plotted relatively far from other, more frequently mentioned student activities. Itis remarkable that none of the students mentioned the explication of this practicalknowledge as a mentoring role. It therefore not only falls outside the scope of mentors’perspectives (Brown & McIntyre, 1995), but is also outside that of the students. As longas mentors are not inclined to explicate their practical knowledge and students do notexplore it, it will remain implicit. However, the explication of practical knowledge canbe of additional value to the observations of mentors’ lessons, as argued in theintroduction.

The last mentor role corresponds with Elliott & Calderhead (1994) and Jones et al.,(1997) who found that mentors felt responsible for showing student teachers the dailyroutines of school. The introductory function of mentors is also advocated by teachereducators and researchers (e.g., Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1993).

Approximately one-third of the student teachers in this study put the role of theirmentors in perspective. For them, mentors were not ‘the only role models’. This showsthat the fear of imitating mentors, often referred to in the literature (Zeichner &Tabachnick, 1981), does not apply to all student teachers.


Relations between expected mentor roles and student activitiesThe HOMALS showed that the students’ expectations of a mentor as a coach oftengoes together with feeling responsible for establishing a good relationship with amentor. Thus, with regard to the interpersonal relationship, there is ‘shared control’. Ofcourse, this conclusion is only tenable for the particular group in the present study.When expecting the mentor to ful�l the role of a coach, information source, orevaluator, the students often expected themselves to ask for this help or information.The analysis did not show other empirically based relations between mentor roles andstudent learning activities. This can be explained by the nature of the data, derivedfrom interviews in which student teachers articulated their expectations towardsthemselves and their mentors. They were free to mention what just came up and to stopwhenever they thought that they had said everything they wanted. They were notforced to work out every possible mentor or student contribution per focus, as in aquestionnaire, because the categories were identi�ed later after the data analysis. Thus,a student teacher could have mentioned the mentor role of introducing him/her toschool life, but perhaps did not mention the (implicit) expectation that (s)he shouldattend extra-curricular activities to become familiar with the school context. With thosedata, not all foci of attention were reproduced as clusters by HOMALS. Nevertheless,a clear distinction between mentor and student activities focusing on learning outcomeor learning process was found. This distinction is comparable to the those made by Ben-Peretz and Rumney (1991) and by Feiman-Nemser and Parker (1993) who stated thatmentors tend to stress teaching performance (the ‘product’) rather than their thinkingabout teaching (the ‘process’).

Practical implications for teacher education and further researchFirstly, on the basis of this study, there do not seem to be any major contradictionsbetween mentor and student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring in general. Obviously,the results of this study must be viewed from the perspective that the study wasconducted with 29 student teachers at one university in the Netherlands and that ‘theliterature’ was from the United Kingdom and the United States. Of course, teachereducators should be aware of the possible mismatch between individual studentteachers’ beliefs about mentoring and those of a mentor. Problems can arise whenstudents and mentors do not have the same interpretation of mentoring. For example,a student teacher complained about such a mismatch or friction. Her mentor thoughtthat he was a model that should be imitated. She refused to do this, because hermentor’s teaching style did not �t her personality and she was convinced that there isnot one perfect way to teach a certain group, a certain subject, or a certain item. Otherstudent teachers complained about a lack of evaluation by their mentors. They felt thatthey had to �gure everything out for themselves. Such friction can inhibit the learningprocess. It seems workable to match the needs of a student teacher to a mentor’s roleinterpretation. However, this is not always desirable in light of the educational goals. Ifstudents only wish immediately applicable tips, and are not inclined to think about whythey do or do not work, they will need some guidance. In that case, they should not bematched to a mentor who mainly gives advice. Thus, matching student teachers’ needsto mentor roles can satisfy both students and mentors, but will not always help studentteachers become ‘re�ective practitioners’ (Schön, 1987). Furthermore, when selecting


or educating mentors, it is important to select those who can perform various roleswhich are essential to the learning-to-teach process.

Secondly, the emphasis on the interpersonal and supporting aspects of mentoring,both by mentor and student teachers, has been described in the literature (e.g., Booth,1993; Tomlinson, 1995). The importance of the supportive role for the students in thepresent study con�rmed this statement. This should be of particular interest for teachereducation. Although these interpersonal aspects are essential, they must not over-shadow other mentoring functions.

Thirdly, mentors should match their way of mentoring to the stage of self-regulationof student teachers. They should, based on the wishes of some of the students in thisstudy and recent views of learning, decrease the external regulation of students’learning (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999). However, this must be compensated by theincrease in self-regulation of student teachers. This requires a lot of mentors andstudent teachers. Mentors should gradually decrease external regulation and teachereducators must, if necessary, train student teachers in regulation skills.

Fourthly, the results of this study indicate that not only mentors tend to overlook thearticulation of their practical knowledge as an essential part of their mentoring role,which has been described in the literature, but that student teachers are also not alwaysaware of its importance. This is in line with the studies by Booth (1993) and Brown(1995). Therefore, we think that it is important to stimulate mentors to explicate theirpractical knowledge and student teachers to explore it. This could perhaps be achievedby getting students to apply several elicitation techniques or aids that have been used inthe research on teacher thinking, knowledge, and beliefs: practical arguments, short-answer tests, metaphors, stimulated recall interviews in which teachers recall theirinteractive cognitions during their lesson, evaluations of one’s own or another’s lessons,concept mapping techniques, or interviews (Kagan, 1990; Meijer, 1999). Studentteachers can then learn to ask about and elicit their mentors’ practical knowledge. Werecognise that the problem of practical knowledge is that it is not conscious knowledge.However, we assume it can vary in degree. Sometimes it can be made explicit byrethinking teaching. In spite of this, some components of practical knowledge willremain unconscious. Thus, student teachers can pro�t from those components ofpractical knowledge that remain implicit, but that can be elicited by purposefulactivities, such as stimulated recall interviews.

This conclusion raises several research questions concerning the instruments to beused, the preconditions, and the outcomes. For example, can the instruments applied inthe research on teacher thinking be the basis for the development of instruments forstudents in an educational setting? What adaptations are necessary to meet students’learning goals and skills? In order to explore their mentors’ practical knowledge,student teachers should be inquiry-oriented and need to be actively involved inregulative learning activities: deciding which aspects of practical knowledge they wantto explore, planning how to access practical knowledge, monitoring the explorations,and checking whether the desirable information has been obtained. Another researchquestion is whether the student teachers have the necessary attitude and skills to do thisinquiry. Research on learning styles has shown that learners differ in their attitudes andactivities (Vermunt, 1998). We encountered these differences in this study.

One �nal important research question is what aspects of practical knowledge can be


derived with the aid of the instruments described above? Does this result in furtherexplication of advice or suggestions that teachers can normally put easily into words?Or does the use of these instruments also elicit aspects of practical knowledge thatnormally remain implicit for student teachers, such as arguments for a speci�c teachingmethod, cognitions during teaching, or beliefs that teachers normally do not talk aboutin a structured way? It is clear that research should reveal more information about thepotential instruments, the preconditions for the inquiry of mentors’ practical knowl-edge, and the educational value of this exploration by student teachers.

ReferencesAnderson, E.M., & Shannon, A.L. (1988). Toward a conceptualization of mentoring. Journal of

Teacher Education, 39, 38–42.Ben-Peretz, M., & Rumney, S. (1991). Professional thinking in guided practice. Teaching and

Teacher Education, 7, 517–530.Boekaerts, M. (1997). Self-regulated learning: A new concept embraced by researchers, policy

makers, educators, teachers, and students. Learning and Instruction, 7, 161–186.Booth, M. (1993). The effectiveness and role of the mentor in school: The students’ view.

Cambridge Journal of Education, 23, 185–197.Brown, S. (1995). The professional craft knowledge of teachers: Student teachers gaining access

to it. In R. Hoz & M. Silberstein (Eds.), Partnerships of schools and institutions of highereducation in teacher development (pp. 25–38). Beer-Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University ofthe Negev Press.

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Received 19 January 2000; revised version received 19 July 2000


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Student teachers’ beliefs about mentoring and learning to teach during teaching practice