Supporting Mentor Teachers in an Era of Changing Science Standards and Pedagogies

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Examining and Supporting the Role of Mentor Teachers

Abstract

In this exploratory study, we provided secondary science mentors with a series of professional development meetings to support their work with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Ambitious Science Teaching (AST), which their preservice teachers encountered in methods courses. We wanted to understand how the mentors made sense of NGSS and AST, and to document how the mentors’ characterizations of their roles shifted over time. Using a situative theoretical approach, we found that the mentors’ characterizations of NGSS and AST differed depending on how they gauged student learning, that the mentors’ characterizations about their roles shifted over time, and that the teacher preparation program needed to provide more support for mentoring.

Authors

• David Stroupe, Michigan State University

• Brian Hancock, Alma College