teacher educators to teach about teaching. With access to new understanding about
how to teach about teaching, participants described the new approaches they took to
their mentoring work.
The fundamental concept that underpinned all Men/tee work was the idea of
treating the practicum as a learning experience for pre-service teachers, rather than a
teaching experience. In this sense, the program was premised on the conception of
the practicum according to Dewey’s( 1904 ) laboratory model, as opposed to the
apprentice model. For many Men/tee participants, the idea of the practicum as a
learning experience was new. Seeing it as such encouraged them to begin to
consider how they might deliberately engineer opportunities for their pre-service
teachers to engage in particular kinds of learning about teaching. For example, new
possibilities opened up for Norman as he considered the mentor report as a kind of
curriculum framework for the practicum. He explains,that was something I’d never
done before; actually pick up the [mentor report] document and look at it.
Liana was similarly affected by reframing the practicum from one of practicing
teaching to one of learning about teaching. In Liana’s case, it altered her approach
to providing feedback to her pre-service teacher so that she was less focused on
telling the pre-service teacher what was right and wrong and more focused on
providing an educative opportunity for the pre-service teacher to learn through
experimentation and reflection on aspects of his developing practice. She explains
I used to write heaps of notes and go through them and it would take hours whereas now I’ll
say“Why don’t we focus on this”and then we work on that and then talk about how well
that did or didn’t work and then make the next plan. So I’m possibly a bit more laid back
and giving them a bit more space to investigate and to make minor mistakes without
stopping them from making their mistakes before they’ve made them.Liana’s description of her changed approach reflects the shift from a technicist
approach to a reflective understanding about how to teach about teaching
(Loughran 2006 ) and marks a significant departure from the master-apprentice
model that problematically typifies the approach taken by many mentors in schools.
Whereas an apprentice—or technicist—approach to teacher education assumes
that pre-service teachers learn how to teach by mimicking the practices of expe-
rienced teachers in schools, a laboratory—or reflective—approach assumes that
there is much more going on in teaching than what is outwardly visible. It therefore
requires a unique range of pedagogical strategies to enable pre-service teachers to
see the complex and often invisible work of pedagogical reasoning that underpins
powerful practice by raising these invisible dimensions of teacher knowledge and
action to the visible surface. In Men/tee, the introduction of two such interrelated
pedagogical strategies influenced how participants undertook their mentoring work:
structured observation and explicit modeling.
It is common during the practicum for pre-service teachers to‘observe’a range
of experienced teachers at work, presumably with the expectation that this will
contribute to their learning about teaching. But according to Loughran ( 2006 ), in
many cases, pre-service teachers do not know what they should be looking at or
what they should be looking for. Worse still, in their observations, pre-service
292 S. White and R. Forgasz