Mentoring has been seen as an ongoing effort to professionalize teaching in teacher education since the 1980s. It is commonly believed that collaborating mentors and student teachers can benefit through the dynamics of school-based mentoring. Reflectivity is said to be one mechanism by which changes occur both in the student teacher and the mentor.
Conventional studies on the reciprocal effects of mentoring on mentors have usually used survey and follow-up interviews, after mentors have completed the mentoring process, as the main methods of data collection. Hence, there is scant literature about how mentors' professional growth develops during mentoring and what factors sustain or hinder such development. The present study aims to investigate the effect of mentoring on mentors' development of expertise in teaching.
Ethnographic research methods incorporating direct observation and interviews were employed in studying four mentors' mentoring practices. These mentors are English and Chinese language teachers who acted as mentors in 2005 for Year 4 students of the Bachelor of Education programme at The University of Hong Kong. An analytical framework developed from the literature is used to interpret and illustrate the effects of mentoring practices on their development of expertise in teaching, in terms of reflection, practical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
The results indicate that student teachers' practices in learning to teach become an object about which mentors engage in reflection. Reflection through conversations plays a key role in experienced teachers' development of expertise in teaching. Such reflection requires three kinds of capacities: theorizing practical knowledge, pedagogical reasoning and collaborative inquiry.
Relationships that are reflective and collaborative, involving co-inquiry about teaching and learning, have been found to be pivotal in mentors' development of expertise in teaching. This study demonstrates