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these observations with Sarah. This three-way dialogic interaction concerning the
perceived learning needs of individual students was incredibly rich and helpful to
Sarah in formulating the pedagogical interventions she intended to experiment with
in her research project. The interactions exemplified a dialogic approach to pedagogy
not only in Sarah’s responses to the needs of her student learners but also through
Debra and Jane’s pedagogical responses to Sarah. Debra and Jane were conscious of
the need to carefully select and negotiate the content and skills to be learned by Sarah
in order that she might transform her practice.
In consultation with Jane and Debra, Sarah decided to investigate whether dif-
ferentiating classroom activities based on the learning needs of her students would
improve their engagement in learning. Jane was experienced at making both planned
and contingent adjustments to her teaching, but how she came up with her good
ideas remained something of a mystery to Sarah. Debra was able to articulate a
planning scaffold for differentiation that made planning differentiated learning
activities more manageable for Sarah. Debra was also providing support to Sarah in
the formulation of her action research project primarily to ensure that what she was
planning was achievable in the time frame for the project. Debra also found it neces-
sary to regularly encourage Sarah away from a focus on measuring the success of
her transformed pedagogy through ‘improved results’ as measured on topic tests
and the like and towards consideration of how she might ‘measure’ improvements
in engagement, her original focus.
As mentioned earlier, Jane was an experienced teacher and school-based teacher
educator. It was Jane who had arranged and supported the school’s component of
the partnership with the university, and she also encouraged the participation of
other teachers in the school in the mentoring course that Debra taught on-site. The
course required teachers to not only attend face-to-face seminars but also to collect
evidence of the mentoring practices that they then annotated and critiqued in light
of assigned readings of research literature. Each seminar involved a high level of
participant discussion in relation to theoretical perspectives and its relationship to
their evidence of their mentoring practices. Jane was particularly interested in the
notion of mentoring ‘in the action’ (Schwille, 2008 ) in which the preservice teacher
and supervising teacher have previously arranged how the supervising teacher
might intervene in the lesson in progress when necessary, to assist the preservice
teacher to learn and make accommodations to their practice.
When Jane stepped into the action of the lesson that Sarah was teaching, it was
with the intent of making shared meaning with Sarah about the action and the range
of possibilities arising from the action. Jane’s stepping in was often initiated by ‘I
wonder if...’ statements directed towards what the students were doing. In directing
her comments towards the students’ actions, Jane took great care that her stepping
in did not signal to the students or to Sarah that there was something not going right
but rather that she had noticed potential for further exploration, comment or depth
of response from the students. As Debra observed these classroom interactions, she
felt that she was the one being mentored by both Sarah and Jane as they provided
the ‘actual doings’ of what mentoring in the action can look like when it is genu-
inely dialogic. The learning through dialogic interaction continued ‘outside the
D. Ta lbot