MENTOR PEDAGOGY AND STUDENT TEACHER PROFESSIONAL-DEVELOPMENT - A STUDY OF 2 MENTORING RELATIONSHIPS

The recent and growing literature on mentoring has seen a lot of studi es focusing on how mentors think about and conceptualise their work. T here has been less which has examined what mentors actually do in prac tice or which attempts to relate mentors' 'espoused' theories to their 'theories in action'. This study elicits two mentors' conceptions of their role, along with their views about what has influenced these con ceptions, before examining the pedagogical practice of the two mentors . Secondly, the study looks at how three student teachers respond to t heir experiences of mentoring with these same two mentors, and attempt s to understand the various ways in which the student teachers' thinki ng about their teaching is influenced by discussions with their mentor . The article concludes with a discussion of the agency of the mentori ng relationship in learning to teach. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.