Supervising Conversations in the Practicum Setting: A Comparison Between Peer Dialogues and Mentoring Dialogues

• In Event: Mentoring as Professional Practice: Studies of Mentoring in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper presents a methodological procedure to analyze the professional practical knowledge that is generated in mentoring conversations during the practicum. The ultimate purpose is to compare two types of supervising conversations: (a) peer dialogues (student-to-student interactions) and (b) mentoring dialogues (expert teacher-student teacher interactions). We recorded and transcribed thirty interactions (15 for each group) and applied a triple discursive analysis from lower to higher levels of scrutiny: (1) analysis of critical incidents (Husu, Toom, & Patrikainen, 2012), topic analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1994), and propositional discourse analysis (Authors, 2015a). For each type, Cohen’s kappa coefficient was calculated. Chi-squared analyses (Cramer’s V) were conducted to statistically test the differences in four types of knowledge: recalls (direct reproductions of what has been experienced: images that teachers extract from the lesson as collected from memory); appraisals (evaluations or value judgments of the action that is being recalled), rules (practical principles for teaching. This is a manner of re-describing particular facts and transforming them into global ideas—abstracting the general from the particular—that can be used in future situations); and artefacts (artifacts constitute instruments, physical support or tools, and mental representations of any procedure or strategy that can be applied in practice). The first two (recalls and appraisals) can be characterized as narrative knowledge (subject to lived experience), whereas the latter two (rules and artefacts) can be identified as inferential knowledge, a more abstract format of representation by which the generalization of practice can be used in future teaching situations.

The main results indicate that peer dialogues elicited 89.3% of narrative knowledge and that only 10.7% was inferential knowledge. Further, mentoring dialogues generated 71.8% of narrative knowledge compared to 28.2% of inferential knowledge. Statistical differences were found between the two types of interactions: 2=8.254 (p= 0.004; df=1), showing that mentoring conversations are more beneficial for inferring rules and artefacts for practice. Cramer’s V was 0.421, which represents a medium-high effect.

The implication of this study is that mentoring dialogues help student teachers learn in more sophisticated and generalizable terms; thus, they invite student teachers to extract rules of practice. Moreover, peer conversations help student teachers analyze practice in more descriptive ways. Therefore, in teacher education programs, we can use peer conversations to encourage student teachers to better understand their practice, whereas mentoring conversations are better for finding ways to change it.

Author

• Juan-José Mena Marcos, Universidad de Salamanca