Curiosity-Driven Discourse as an Opportunity for Mentors' Professional Growth as Teachers

• In Event: New Perspectives on Teacher Learning: Teachers as Facilitators of Peers' Professional Growth

Abstract

Objectives: Video-based evidence can play a central role in teachers’ professional learning when engaged in collaborative discourse (Gaudin & Chaliès 2015, Lefstein, Louie, Segal, & Becher, 2020a). However, research on mentor-mentee discourse mainly focuses on the mentee’s professional growth and often misses the growth of the mentor. Although many agree that mentoring contributes to the mentors' professional growth in both mentoring and teaching (Schneider, 2008; Hudson, 2013; Ambrosseti & Dekkers, 2010; van Ginkel, Verloop, & Denessen, 2016), empirical data is scarce.
Perspectives: This paper reports on the impact of a specially designed curiosity-driven discourse (CDD) among teachers when playing the role of mentors. Rather than evaluating teaching actions they observe in evidence from their own classrooms (e.g. video recording), the participants in a CDD are encouraged to focus on points that stimulate their shared professional interest.
Theoretical framework. We employed the model of levels of awareness in order to evaluate this impact (Blinded, 2019; Blinded, 2018; Blinded, 2018; Mason, 1998, 2002, 2008). Specifically, we referred in our analysis to Awareness In Action (AIA) -- the awareness of teaching actions in planning and executing a lesson and Awareness In Disciplines (AID) -- the ability of the teacher to connect anecdotal occurrences in class to two disciplines: the one she teaches (e.g. physics) and the discipline of teaching the subject matter .
Research questions:
1. What evidence do we have of mentors’ growth as teachers when engaged in CDD?
2. How can we quantify this growth?
Methods. The research population comprised 8 in-service physics and mathematics teachers who practiced CDD both as mentors and mentees in a specially designed workshop. The participants completed forms during the workshop and their reflections on their experience before and after mentoring were collected and categorized according to the above-mentioned awareness framework.
Preliminary results. An example of an AIA response:
“I understood better the [students’] confusion when calculating the instantaneous velocity in an experiment or in theory.”
An example of an AID response:
“In the discussion [with the mentee] regarding flowcharts, I understood that this is a tool that might contribute to [students’] understanding, for example, of Lenz’s law, but it has limitations -- it is a very verbal tool.”
Analysis of the participants' responses regarding what they have learned as teachers from being mentors (N=45) and watching their mentees’ video, revealed that about 44% of them could be related to AID before conducting a CDD while after the discourse more than 92% were of this type (see Figure 2). This elevation in the level of awareness shows that mentoring fostered mentors’ growth as teachers.
Significance of the study: This study offers a way to identify and quantify the growth of teachers that take part in CDD, thus giving a sense of what a Productive Pedagogical Discourse (Lefstein, Vedder-Weiss, & Segal, 2020b) might be. It also offers a way to test the above-mentioned model of levels of awareness.

Authors

• Roni Jutkowitz, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Avraham Merzel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Ruti Segal, Oranim Academic College of Education, Shannan Academic College of Education

• Yaron Lehavi, The David Yellin College of Education