Supporting Early Career Teachers' Understanding of Challenges in Classroom Interaction Through Mentoring Dialogues

• In Event: Mentoring in Teacher Induction Programs: Helping Beginner Teachers to Teach

Abstract

Recent studies on early career teachers indicate that functioning classroom interaction plays a central role in teachers’ work. Capabilities in maintaining interaction with pupils are related to reduced experiences of inadequacy and turnover intentions (Authors, 2015). This sets high demands for teacher education and mentoring practices to provide early career teachers with capabilities to overcome both present and future challenges (Solheim et al., 2018). Maintaining classroom interaction is a basic teaching skill requiring a variety of possibilities to learn in teacher education (Vermunt, 2014). It benefits from theoretical understanding and hands-on practice (Janssen et al., 2015) and systematic, repeated reflection with experienced mentor (Peercy et al., 2020). Mentoring dialogues allows early career teachers to learn conditions for pupil learning. Thus, early career teachers should be provided with extensive possibilities to learn to construct classroom interaction and solve challenges (Heikkinen, 2017; Peercy & Troyan, 2017; Zeichner et al., 2015). While earlier research on the topic is scarce, this study aims to clarify the modes of mentoring dialogues. The following research questions are addressed: (1) What challenges do the early career teachers identify from the classroom interaction? (2) How do the early career teachers together with their mentors structure the classroom interaction challenges in dialogue?

The study was conducted among early career teachers and mentors in Finnish teacher education. The video and stimulated recall (STR) data were collected from 41 early career teacher and mentor pairs (Authors, 2008; 2020). The procedure allowed the participants to ground dialogues to practice of classroom interaction. The challenging events (f=41) early career teachers identified were analysed into two exclusive categories: social challenges and academic challenges (Pianta & Hamre, 2009). The STR data (1294 units) were analysed with a framework including the three aspects of dialogues: appraising, solution-seeking and understanding (Mena et al., 2012b; Peercy et al., 2020).

The results show that early career teachers mainly identified academic challenges (61%). They found them challenging to solve while trying to maintain functioning classroom interaction. Social challenges (39%) contested them differently: the classroom interaction should be paced down before focusing on pupil learning. In appraising mentoring dialogues (42%), early career teachers showed a tendency to evaluate themselves, and mentors did not succeed in changing the tone of the dialogue. The mentoring dialogues emphasising understanding (33%) aimed to increase a more comprehensive view of the challenges. However, only 25% of the mentoring dialogues were solution-seeking, where the aim was to formulate strategies to overcome the challenges and be prepared for teachers’ work.

Our study shows that challenging classroom events identified by early career teachers can serve as a vehicle for productive mentoring dialogues and allow a variety of learning opportunities both for early career teachers and mentors. The mentoring dialogues contained both the evaluative and the foundational elements of the classroom challenges. Surprisingly, concrete and practical strategies were not at the core in the mentoring dialogues. Thus, we emphasize the need to carefully consider and monitor the quality of the mentoring dialogues in line with the learning needs of early career teachers.

Authors

• Auli Toom, University of Helsinki

• Jukka Husu, University of Turku