Mentoring to transgress: practicing inspection, reciprocity and hope in teacher education

Abstract

This study examines the work of cooperating teachers (CTs) within a literacy leadership course to construct transgressive mentoring practices that work against the grain of what is typical in schools. Previous research on coaching preservice teachers has not focused on the work that inservice teachers do to provide mentoring towards transgressive teaching practices. We ask, how do CTs within literacy leadership courses construct transgressive mentoring practices? Through our qualitative analysis of primarily conversations about coaching, we document how seven CTs' reflections, individual and in community, led them to inspection, reciprocity and hope in their practices as teachers and coaches. This study has implications for the teacher educators including the development of professional learning opportunities for CTs and for researchers who intend to study such learning communities across contexts.

Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education

“…For example, in Fall 2021 with Cohort C, Liz and Heather assigned peer partners based on observations of PTs’ engagement with the course and provided sentence stems for peers to use during coaching sessions, revising them three times throughout the course (see Appendix 1). The peer coaching sentence stems were derived from our critical and justice-focused coaching work (Mosley Wetzel et al, 2023; Mosley Wetzel et al, 2017), connected to our teacher preparation program's social justice cross-cutting themes, and responsive to our observations of PTs’ peer coaching sessions. After the first week of peer coaching, Liz and Heather noticed that the majority of the peer coaching sessions focused on affirmations, rather than inquiring or offering suggestions, and adjusted the sentence stem prompts accordingly.…”

“…As a research team, we initially used definitions and approaches of “peer coaching” (Lu, 2010) to center peer learning when creating instructional practices in our courses. The language of partnerships reflects our choice to steer away from hierarchical, evaluative, and prescriptive models of coaching toward equity-focused ones that emphasize participation, collaboration, and reflection (Mosley Wetzel et al, 2023). Conceptualized in this way, partnerships both disrupt power relations and hierarchical systems within teacher education and make space for more generative ways of supporting PTs.…”

“Reading” Into Statistics: Systems Analysis and Action in an Early Career Mentor Community

“…UDIP was available to all ECT teachers working on these selected campuses; ECT participation was voluntary but strongly encouraged by campus administrators, and the majority of ECTs participated. The TLs, who all had previous teaching and coaching experience, were provided professional development in reflective coaching models (Mosley Wetzel et al, 2023), but were not asked to follow a particular protocol. Instead, the TLs were asked to be responsive to the emergent urgent needs of the ECTs.…”

“…The second way TLs constructed responses to inequities was by defining their locus of control; in other words, by finding ways they could impact practice and make change. This term came from the January 21 Center Hours when the director led a discussion of coaching as a practice to make systemic changes within the classroom (Mosley Wetzel et al, 2023). The session was intended to empower TLs to address systemic inequities at a local level, even when the source of the inequity was not local.…”

“…It follows from this research that mentors do need a professional community to support them in this work. Most of the studies about problem solving in mentor professional communities that focus directly on systemic inequities are in preservice settings, where mentors of student teachers, not ECTs, learned to mentor critically (e.g., Land, 2018; Mosley Wetzel et al, 2021; Taylor et al, 2018). In these studies, mentors benefited from sustained support in content, coaching practices, and building critical perspectives from peers within a mentor community.…”