For researchers, committed to a research problem, finding meaningful answers is a process of careful weighting and interpreting what is actually found as an outcome of their mode of inquiry in reference to initial intentions and research goals. Particularly in doing qualitative research in/on teaching researchers have recognised the need to acknowledge the ways in which one's intentions interact with the process of study, and how they serve to shape research outcomes. Such a recognition calls for attention to working in the interpretive zone (Wasser and Bresler 1996). Based on our own studies on teachers' reflective expertise, we show how articulation of researchers' intent and deliberation in designing a study could ameliorate critical subjectivity and reflection while analysing and interpreting accounts of data and clarifying interactions between researcher and their object of study in the construction of knowledge. This lead us to construct a heuristic tool for achieving greater reflexivity in conducting research, which may be utilised, primarily, in programmes aimed at research education.

Given the dissonant and complex character of induction for novices at the workplace, I propose a conception of mentoring that focuses on mitigating misalignments between novices’ developmental stage and the socializing characteristics and pressures of workplace induction. Drawing on extant research and conceptualization, including my own research on mentoring for teacher induction, this article addresses three interrelated questions: What are the central tasks of mentors in promoting effective induction of novice teachers at the workplace? What do mentors need to know in order to perform these tasks?  What kind of professional frameworks for learning to mentor?  I claim that in order to help novices ‘break good from experience’, as the title metaphorically suggests, mentors need to be prepared to flexibly adapt strategies from diverse mentoring models according to the particular socio-cultural features of induction of novices’ workplace and to aspects of subject matter teaching. Such kind of mentoring is, thus, attentive to discursive tensions between ideologies, rituals, values, belief systems and behaviors that surge amongst the various players involved. The article describes the central tasks for mentors of novice teachers, the knowledge-base required of mentors in order to perform these tasks and the kind of professional frameworks for learning to mentor.

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