A Barkatsas

An analysis of three different approaches to student teacher mentoring and their impact on knowledge generation in practicum settings

Mentoring in Teacher Education is a key component in the professional development of student teachers. However, little research focuses on the knowledge shared and generated in mentoring conversations. In this paper, we explore the knowledge student teachers articulate in mentoring conversations under three different post-lesson approaches to mentoring: dialogue journaling, regular conferences and stimulated-recall conferences. Propositional discourse analysis identified 4534 propositions that were subsequently classified into four types of knowledge: recalls, appraisals, rules and artefacts along with the precision of arguments therein. Additionally, log-linear analyses were conducted to search for differences among the three mentoring approaches. The results indicate that dialogue journaling demonstrated more appraisals of practice, regular conferences emphasised rules and artefacts, and stimulated-recall favoured more precision in the type of the arguments stated. The three mentoring styles favour different but complementary understandings of practice and point to the impact of various approaches to mentoring on the sort of knowledge shared and generated in post-lesson mentoring conferences.

Learners’ Preferred Mathematical Task Types: The Values Perspective

Through the interpretation of a set of data from a research study that investigated grade 5 and 6 students’ preferences among three types of mathematical tasks, this chapter presents an alternative way in which data might be interpreted. While it was found that across the areas of number and geometry, the three types of tasks were most preferred across different geographical locations, the values perspective demonstrated a remarkably consistent valuing of ‘challenge’, ‘easiness’ and ‘real life scenario’. It is proposed that this ‘rethinking’ into the way in which collected data might be analysed from the values perspective can potentially enrich our understanding of how we can better facilitate mathematics learning and teaching in schools.