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With all the current talk of mentors and proteges in the business world, we thought it strange that no one had explored in the professional literature whether teachers ever have mentors. Although few beginning teachers have been given much guidance by anyone during their first three years of teaching, we assumed that there must be a fortunate few who had established a close relationship during the induction period with a person who could be called a mentor. We also agreed that an exploration of this ideal student-teacher relationship might provide some direction to the development of teacher education programs that would, by their example, lead aspiring teachers toward a teaching personality that emphasized warmth, personal commitment, and professional excellence. So we set out to find, first of all, whether teachers believed themselves to have had mentors. They did. Then we examined what those relationships were like. Finally we looked for insights that might be useful for encouraging the positive aspects of mentoring in teacher socialization.What follows is a result of those efforts. Socialization and MentorsZeichner (1979) and others have presented convincing arguments about the need to allow aspiring teachers to assume an equal role in determining their own professional identities. Thus, teacher preparation programs must be bilateral, with trainer and trainee working together to make decisions about the types of experiences needed. Their relationship must further be informal and open.These trainer-trainee relationship characteristics are highly similar to those described by Clawson (1980), who examined mentoring in managerial careers. He found that mentor-protege relationships are mutual in that both parties had made a commitment to common goals, and comprehensive in their breadth of influence. In other words, mentors and proteges are very much involved in working together in a wide variety of professional or career concerns. The relationships are open, informal, and have a high frequency of interaction. Clawson found mentors, in dealing with their proteges, to be consistent, informal, willing to share information, and demanding. They also desired to function as mentors. He found proteges to be people-oriented, enthusiastic, flexible, willing to work, independent, and desirous of being a protege.' To find out whether teachers had experienced relationships like those described by Clawson and, if so, to discover the nature of the relationships and the situations in which they occurred, the following study was initiated.The Mentor Study A sample of 300 teachers from 12 schools (three high schools, three middle schools, and six elementary schools) was drawn from a large Western suburban school district. The teachers were asked to complete a short questionnaire concerning their careers in teaching. One part of the questionnaire asked if at any stage in their career or career preparation there had been anyone outside the family who had taken a personal interest in their careers and had helped, guided, or sponsored ...

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This article looks at the popularity of curriculum integration in the 1990s in the United States. It offers evidence from national curriculum standards documents, books in print, journal articles, national coalitions and organizations, and curriculum in use to suggest that curriculum integration is experiencing a peak in interest, much like the early era of progressive education, and the open education movement of the 1960s. It further traces the intellectual roots of the current movement and looks at the conceptual differences in the two factions in the curriculum integration movement: the correlated/fused and the core. Different assumptions about the primary source of the curriculum lie at the heart of the split. An extensive reference section offers a sample of the writings on curriculum integration in the 1990s.