Teacher preparation policy and practice:
How course and field instructors should handle discussion of activities in mentor teachers’ classrooms

Endorsed by the Academic Program and Policy Committee for Teacher Preparation on 19 May 2005

Policy

The contributions of mentor teachers

Mentor teachers are essential instructors in a teacher preparation program:

In all these ways, mentor teachers expose their practice and thinking to be considered by teacher candidates and interns in their education as teachers. These are vital contributions to teacher preparation, in part because they provide teacher candidates and interns a wealth of images to talk about, and in part because they provide the novices a practice of teaching that complicates the thinking they bring from their experience as students in school, that motivates them to learn something from the teacher preparation program, and that gives them experience, in the role of teacher, to which they can relate their studies.

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Instructors’ obligations to mentor teachers

Because mentor teachers’ reveal their thoughts and practices as they do, course and field instructors have a collective duty to reveal their own practices—especially the ways in which they attempt to work ethically and educatively with teacher candidates’ and interns’ reports of their experiences in mentor teachers’ classrooms.

This document aims to begin meeting that duty.  First, it states the main principles to be followed when discussing novices’ experiences in mentor teachers’ classrooms, in order both to treat mentor teachers properly as colleagues and to get full value from novices’ experiences at school. A following section describes a practice that attempts to follow the principles, to indicate more clearly what the principles might mean.  The document also addresses the hard, special case when a novice describes to a course or field instructor what might be a professionally unacceptable practice in a mentor teacher’s classroom. 

Throughout, the term “teacher candidate” will refer to MSU students in undergraduate TE courses, and the term “intern” will refer to MSU students in the internship, and the term “novice” will refer to them collectively.

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Principles for working with teacher candidates’ and interns’ accounts of activity in mentor teachers classrooms:

1. Establish ethical ground rules. [practice] Early in the course, establish and maintain ethical ground rules for all discussion, oral or written, of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms. The first ground rule is to provide anonymity for the teachers and students whose activities are being discussed—at least, mask their identities. Get other ground rules for discussion from ethical principles of universality, reciprocity, and caring, discussed in the account of practice below.

2. Explore ideas about learning to teach. [practice] Early in the course and occasionally thereafter, explore with teacher candidates and interns ideas about how they will learn or could learn from their practice work in schools.  Their ideas about that can make large differences in the soundness and fairness of their thinking about activity in mentor teacher’s classrooms.

3. Always start with careful descriptions. [practice] Require that the first step of all such discussions is to produce careful, specific, dispassionate descriptions of the activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms.  To get the situation and important details right, it may be necessary to try re-enactments or role-playing.

4. Consider alternative hypotheses. [practice] Consistently require teacher candidates or interns to construct and compare alternative hypotheses about the activity they have described.  At the same time, explore with them their related ideas, for example, about human frailty, forces at work upon students and teachers, and the vague connection between intention and action.

5.  Then proceed to assessments. [practice] If the preceding principles have been well honored, it is then reasonable to attempt to make assessments.  These should be clearly based in careful description, carefully reasoned, and generous to the persons—teachers and students--who produced the activity being discussed. Toward those ends, carefully explore the comparisons being made among ideals, standards, recommendations, and activity in schools.

6.  Recall the network of duties. [practice] Throughout, keep in mind the program’s duties to school pupils, to their teachers as colleagues in teacher preparation, to the teachers’ schools, and to the teacher candidates or interns involved.

To make clearer what the principles might mean, a following section describes a practice of leading discussions that attempts to satisfy those principles and help novices to learn the most from their experiences.  Taken together, the policy and following description of practice serve to guide almost all discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms.

Here in the policy proper, there is one more sad and awkward possibility to address.

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The hard, special case of unacceptable practice

In a discussion of some activity in a mentor teacher’s classroom, a course or field instructor could begin to think that a teacher candidate’s or intern’s description--carefully obtained--reveals a practice widely agreed to be unprofessional and unacceptable. That practice might have been directed to school pupils, or to the teacher candidate or intern.

This is a high-stakes situation for everyone—the school pupils, the mentor teacher, the novice teacher, the school, and the teacher preparation program. Let us survey the duties involved.

A survey of duties

Procedure to be followed

Neither the novice teacher nor the instructor should act alone.

Rather, they should call upon the Team Leader, who should again take the novice through a careful and specific description, in order to exercise independent judgment about the matter. Depending on the account and other circumstances, the Team Leader might involve the Department Chair and inform the Associate Dean, so that the program will be fully prepared to act on its considered professional judgment.

In general, the Team Leader should inform the Principal

One way this could occur is that the Team Leader could report to the Principal--without naming anyone--that a report of unacceptable practice has been received and carefully examined. The principal might already have heard something of the matter, and be proceeding on her own information. Or not. In either case, the Team Leader could consult with the Principal about how to proceed.  What to do about the placement also can be discussed, if necessary, without naming names. In some cases, this deliberately vague discussion might lead to a course of action that is wise for all concerned.

But if the Team Leader and Principal proceed beyond the vague discussion, they both face, from their respective positions, a talk with the Mentor Teacher. The Team Leader cannot remove the novice from the placement without giving some explanation to the Mentor Teacher, who is a colleague in the teacher preparation program.  The Principal cannot agree to that removal without giving some explanation to the Mentor Teacher, because it is based on a report about the Mentor Teacher’s practice.  And the Principal cannot rightfully take the Team Leader’s report of the possible unacceptable practice without also having some conversation with the Mentor Teacher.

The Team Leader and Principal face a difficult decision. At that point, it might be helpful to ask, If the Mentor Teacher were our good friend, what would caring for our good friend and that friend’s students require us to do?  Whether we consider the matter from the standpoint of the teacher preparation program or from the standpoint of the school we seem to get to the same place:  A claim has been made that the teacher has committed an unacceptable practice, and that teacher must be given an opportunity to respond.

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PRACTICE: A description of a discussion practice that aims to enact the principles

The main aim of this account is make clearer what the above-stated principles might mean in the daily work of course and field instructors.  If the account provides instructors useable options, so much the better.  New instructors may wish to study the account below, in order to form a working position as quickly as possible.

The practice described here has been taking place two mornings a week, in one of the classrooms of a school where a dozen teachers participate in mentoring a section of teacher candidates, who are assigned in pairs to work in the mentor teachers’ classes as assistant teachers.  After working with the teachers and their pupils for 90 minutes each morning, the candidates proceed to another classroom in the school to work with their course instructor, who has been wandering among the classrooms where they work.

Door open, to match the doors that have been opened to them, the teacher candidates talk with each other and their instructor about what they have seen, heard, read and done in the classrooms just down the hall. No topic is off limits. No conclusion is forbidden--so long as it has been reached reasonably, with care for the persons being discussed. Standing with his back to the open door, leading a discussion of activity in classrooms next door or down the hall, the instructor is acutely aware of his situation.

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Stance

A practice tends to reveal or enact a stance toward a matter. A stance toward handling discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms can be formed from these three ideas. 

The premise of practice work

Teacher candidates’ and interns are placed for practice work in the reciprocal expectations (a) that the practice work will help the teacher candidates or interns to learn to teach and (b) that the teacher candidates or interns will be educationally useful to mentor teachers’ pupils. All reasoning and action under this policy should be thoughtfully directed to achieving those dual aims.

Duties to all concerned

Instructors and mentor teachers have duties to each other; to the teacher candidates and interns who are their shared students; to school pupils, to whose interests all of the participating adults are committed; and to school faculties and administrators, who may be affected even if not directly involved. This network of relationships and duties should be kept carefully in mind in all discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms.

Distinctions among practices

Finally, it is necessary to consider the acceptance, approval, or disapproval within the profession of whatever teaching practices are being discussed. Consider four classes:

Standards-oriented practice.  In the past decade, policy makers have escalated dramatically the learning standards for school pupils, calling for all students to achieve high levels of competence. Both teachers and teacher educators are working to discover and implement teaching practices that can help some large proportion of school pupils to achieve those demanding standards. As new members of the teaching profession, teacher candidates and interns should learn those practices.  For the purpose of discussing activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms, instructors can note that the standards-oriented practices tend to be demanding of teachers.  Also, that relatively few teachers now at work have been provided the professional development and ongoing support that are needed to master them.

Common practice.  For some long time, there has been a distinctive teaching practice that can be seen in many or most school classrooms.  This common practice has done, and continues to do, much educational good for many students.  Instructors, teacher candidates, and interns can maintain a consistently respectful posture toward mentor teachers only by maintaining a consistent position of respect for the common practice.  This posture does not contradict the instructors’ duties to teach the standards-driven practices and to require teacher candidates and interns to work steadily toward an evenhandedly critical understanding of the rationales, strengths, and weaknesses of all of the teaching options available to them. 

Questionable practice. Some practices that were formerly counted as part of the common practice have been called into question by changes in standards, changes in school student bodies, or by accumulated research.  Extensive memorization from textbooks has been called into question by standards requiring comprehension, application, and analysis, if only because memorization competes for the same scarce class time with activities that could promote comprehension, analysis, and so on. Similarly, requiring all students to conform exactly to the same specific norms for interaction with the teacher (“look at me when I talk to you”) has been called into question by the understanding that students’ home cultures can have different norms for adult-child interaction (in some, a child’s looking directly at an adult’s face is regarded to be rude).

Momentary lapses. The stresses and strains of teaching and learning at close quarters for days and weeks on end can push both students and teachers into acts that are unkind, discourteous, uncivil, uncaring, or even unprofessional: shouting, calling names, ignoring each other, and so on. Short of unacceptable practice, and short of some degree of repetition, momentary lapses have little or no ethical or educational significance.  It’s just life happening.

Unacceptable practice. Some practices are widely agreed to be unacceptable and unprofessional for any teacher in any circumstance.  The category includes substantial ignorance of the subject matter taught, grossly incompetent organization or management of a class, verbal and physical abuse, neglect or isolation of students who are difficult to teach, signs and showings of bias or bigotry, and other substantial failures in competence and ethics.  While the practices clearly are unacceptable, it is not always clear whether a given incident belongs in the class. For, example, if a teacher lays hands on a student in the course of some confrontation, the interpretation depends greatly on the details of he situation and the precise characteristics of the teacher’s action.

With such a stance, the instructor then comes to the practical question: How should course and field instructors handle discussion of activities in mentor teachers’ classrooms? Comments about those activities could arise in a small group discussion, in a whole-class discussion, in a writing assignment, or in one-to-one consultation between a course or field instructor and a teacher candidate or intern.  How should they be handled?

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1. Establish ethical ground rules

First, and at the beginning of the course, establish and maintain ethical ground rules for the discussion. To undertake responsible discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms, teacher candidates and interns should get increasingly clearer about the relationships and duties involved, and should form an explicit set of ethics about them.  Clearly, a course or field instructor is obliged to provide some ethical leadership.

One ground rule is clear:  Class discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms should, as far as possible, make the teacher, students, and school anonymous.  For the purposes of a teacher preparation course, it does not matter who the particular teacher and students are; what matters is the description of the activity. 

But a rule for masking identities is not, by itself, nearly enough. It is possible to abuse an unnamed colleague.  To form more of the needed ground rules, an instructor can discuss with teacher candidates and interns any of the following ethical ideas. 

A principle of universality. Or as an instructor might put it, “If we were making rules for all discussions of all teachers' teaching, not knowing whether we might appear as a student, a teacher, or someone discussing a teacher's work, what would we want the rules to be, for all such discussions?”

A principle of reciprocity. Or as an instructor might put it, “If mentor teachers were discussing your practice as a teacher, what ground rules for discussion would you want them to honor?  What would you want them to worry about? What care would you want them to take?  How can we apply the Golden Rule to our discussion of mentors' practices?”

A practice of caring.  Or as an instructor might put it, “Nel Noddings might ask us this:  If we are the ones-caring and the teachers and pupils are the ones we are caring for, then what care should we be taking in our discussions of them and their activity? We are working in human relationship with the persons we are about to discuss. They are not lab equipment, but are our colleagues and pupils and fellow human beings. How should we proceed, if we want to have and to promote a community of caring that includes them?”

A utilitarian idea.  Or as an instructor might put it, “If we want this discussion to achieve the most good and do the least harm for you and everyone we will talk about, how should we proceed?”

Course and field instructors should establish the ethical framework very early in the semester or year, and should take care to maintain and teach it in all talk or writing about activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms.

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2. Explore ideas about learning to teach

Before practice work begins in schools, explore how teacher candidates and interns can learn from their practice work in schools.

In preparing the teacher candidates or interns to make good use of their practice work, the instructor can raise this matter quickly by saying, “If I were you, I would want my mentor teacher to be just like my favorite teacher from school, and the perfect image of my ideal future self, and a paragon of all of the methods we will be studying in the course.  What is the probability of that?”  Experience suggests that at least some of the candidates or interns will be grinning by the second “and;” the instructor can reach quick agreement that the probability is near zero. So it might be agreed that the candidates or interns will be working with normal human beings who are trying to teach school.

Then the instructor can ask, “How can we maintain a posture of respect toward a normal human being who is trying to teach school, and learn a great deal about teaching by working in that person’s classroom?”  Experience suggests that the novices will respond in terms of attitudes such as “keeping an open mind.” The instructor will want to move the discussion from attitudes to practices. “How—as a practice—do we keep an open mind?  What do we do?” The novices may have some useable experience from their lives outside school, and that can be brought into the discussion.

The instructor can suggest that the opening joke points to an idea of learning to teach, and ask what it is. Someone in the class will suggest that the idea is mimicry or copying, and if necessary the instructor can offer the more dignified terms “modeling” or “emulation.”

Then the instructor can ask the class to assess the virtues and risks of emulation, both when one admires a mentor teacher and her practices, and when one does not.  It is a two by two table, and each cell has important content, some of which the candidates will be able to identify, and other parts of which the instructor will have to supply.  The idea of teaching as a body of analyzable practices, as distinct from a style or a personality, is likely to play an important part in developing all four cells.

When emulation has been assessed practically, the instructor could then ask how else one could learn by working in a classroom with a normal human being who is trying to teach school.  Experience suggests that one answer is likely to be, “We will see what works and what doesn’t.” The instructor can again proceed practically: “How—by what practices—will we figure out what works and what doesn’t?  What will be our indicators of ‘works,’ and how will we do the ‘figuring out’?”

By this practical treatment and with aid from the instructor, the class collectively can approach a position like this: We can maintain a posture of respect and try to learn the maximum from our work in classrooms by participating in and carefully analyzing the interaction between teachers and students in schools.  The instructor then can sharpen and endorse that position as the policy of the course.

The preceding exercise might take about 30 minutes.  It can be the opening move in a course-long campaign to help the novices learn to work with colleagues and learn the maximum from their experience as teachers. And, the instructor probably will have reduced the risk of unwanted explosions and useless fretting in the first weeks of practice work.

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3. Start with careful descriptions

Require that the first step of all discussions of the activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms, whether in writing or in small groups or in the whole class, is to produce careful, specific, dispassionate descriptions

Recall that teacher candidates and interns tend to be young, idealistic, serious, inexperienced as teachers, and in the middle of figuring out their role responsibilities to everyone around them. Early in the program, instructors should provide high scaffolding for their efforts to make sense of what they see and hear. IF that high scaffolding has been provided in the early going, then subsequent instructors can lower it somewhat, without ever getting out of the game.

To provide ethical and practical scaffolding, the instructor should insist that all discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms will be based on careful, specific, and vivid descriptions of that activity. Descriptions--what could be seen and heard--as distinct from completing a plausible story from inadequate information, from interpretation, from evaluation, and from proposals about how the students or teacher should have acted,

It may be necessary to ask a teacher candidate or intern to re-enact some of the activity to get a clear picture of the events that the novice is talking about, and in order to make crucial distinctions about the practice.  For example, the exact words, volume and tone of voice may be important;  in that case, the instructor probably should ask the candidate to reproduce those, as exactly as possible, rather than trying to describe them.

The other circumstances at the moment may matter; these should be inquired about.  The history of events may matter; what can the teacher candidate report from direct observation and from remarks by students and teachers?

The consequences of classroom activity will be discussed at some point.  What can the novice report--from direct observation--about the appearance, demeanor, and actions of the students and teacher, that might be evidence about the effects of the activity?

Generally, the time and care to get the description will repay itself.  In some cases, the requirement to describe, or the description itself, will put the classroom activity in a different light than the teacher candidate’s opening comment suggested.  In any case, instructors should be helping the novices to learn to recall dispassionately what could be seen and heard; this is an important disposition and set of skills that deserve instructors’ time and attention.

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4. Consider alternative hypotheses and novices’ related ideas.

Consistently require teacher candidates or interns to construct and compare alternative hypotheses about the activity they have described.  At the same time, explore with them their related ideas, for example, about human frailty, forces at work upon students and teachers, and the tenuous connection between intention and action.

Here is another point for scaffolding.  An instructor may wish to organize small groups for the kind of discussions that can occur among equals, and then use whole class interaction about some of the cases to push up the rigor of the treatment.  If willing to operate on a basis other than the ideal of a conversation among equals, the instructor can take up the idea of cognitive apprenticeship, lead the analysis of some of the cases from small group discussions, and so work in the region between reasoning that novices can produce on their own and reasoning they can produce with the instructor’s active assistance and leadership.  If instructors do this, what could they be working on?

Alternative hypotheses about the activity

Often, in their presentation of classroom activity, teacher candidates or interns will reveal that they hold particular hypotheses about what was going on.  The exploration of these can proceed as follows: The instructor can respond to a statement containing an explicit or implicit hypothesis by saying, “That’s a plausible hypothesis; tell us another one.”  As the novice who spoke generates more hypotheses, keep saying, ““That’s a plausible hypothesis; tell us another one.”  When the novice who spoke runs out, the instructor can permit other members of the class to join in offering hypotheses--but treat those comments as though they had been offered by the one who spoke first.  The object is not to get five teacher candidates or interns arguing about hypotheses for which only one has any data.  Rather, the object is to get the novice who spoke first and has data (a) to confront the fact that what s/he said was an hypothesis, as distinct from obvious truth or common sense, and (b) to confront the set of plausible hypotheses, which probably will have greatly changed the potential complexion of the analysis.

Then the instructor could ask the novice who spoke first, “Now you have several plausible hypotheses about what was going on in the activity.  How can you choose among them?”  One possible answer is, “I need more information.”  The instructor can call that response intelligent, and proceed by asking about how to get the needed data.  This can lead into the practices of having conversations with teachers and pupils, taking care to read the worksheet that was on the pupils’ desks at the time of the activity, noticing the content of the list on the blackboard or overhead projector, etc.

But also pose this question: “Yet we often face situations in which we must or will act on current data which equally recommend all our hypotheses, so how could we choose among them?  In acting, we will choose, so how could we choose?”  Teacher candidates and interns will have more difficulty with this question, but might come up with one useful answer: “I should choose hypotheses on which I can act productively, as distinct from hypotheses that provide me no course of action, and from hypotheses that provide me excuses to avoid acting.” If the novices can’t come up with this on their own, the instructor can suggest it. 

The instructor can offer other suggestions, like this: “We could choose hypotheses that afford the most favorable conception of the cared-for that we can square with the facts. We should do that because holding the most favorable conception will help us, as the one-caring, to behave well toward the cared-for (pupils or teacher in the activity being discussed).”

Intentionality and self-assessment

At some points, it can be useful for the instructor to ask, “Do teachers and students always intend and approve of all of their own acts?”  Or, “Are students always thinking about teachers or even school when they do whatever they do in classrooms?” Opportunities here are to help the novices deliberately form ideas of classroom activity in which the teacher is not the center of the universe, or to think of students as people who go around having their own goals, even during school, and to recognize that in schools as in life, humans don’t always approve of what they did, or do what they intended, or even approve, afterward, of what they intended at the time.  These are opportunities to get teacher candidates and interns into the invisible mental games of teaching and studenting and to begin to suspect that not all students are just like them.

Evidence of consequences and aftermaths

At some points the instructor should ask, “Do you have first-hand knowledge of the teacher’s or student’s response to that situation?  What did you observe of the teacher’s or student’s own behavior immediately following the situation you described?  Do you recall any other interactions between the teacher and that students later in the day?”  As ordinary mortals sometimes make messes, and sometimes are embarrassed or irritated with themselves, they also sometimes attempt to make repairs later.  Did the novice draw a hasty conclusion and turn off the show, or stay tuned to see what happened after the commercial break?

Getting more information

Another useful question is, “Did you ask the teacher or student about his/her thinking regarding the activity?” Often, the teacher candidate’s or intern’s answer will be, “No, I did not ask the student.”  This is an opportunity to work with teacher candidates and interns on having conversations with students, and on assessment.

Often, the novice’s answer will be, “No, I did not ask the teacher.”  The instructor might suspect that not asking the teacher was an intelligent decision, because the novice does not yet know how to ask the question without showing that s/he has already leaped to a hasty conclusion.

There is an important teaching opportunity here.  Under what circumstances might or should the candidate or intern ask the question? Equally vitally, how should the question be asked? The instructor can say, “I’m the mentor teacher; ask me,”  and not be surprised if the novice cannot, in three tries, get the hasty conclusion out of the question.  The instructor can describe that not as a failure, but as a need to learn.

To help, suggest a question form, in three parts, marked in this example:  “(a) A few minutes ago, you went over to John’s desk, put your head very close to his, and spoke to him with a firm sort of face.  (b) I think it would help me as a new teacher (c) to know what you were thinking about then.”  The formula:  (a) dispassionate description of the situation of interest, (b) invocation of the novice’s need to learn and thus the teacher’s duty as a mentor, and (c) simple, general, open-ended request for information about what was going on in the mentor teacher’s mind.  The novice’s response to the teacher’s answer, if given, usually it is just, “Thank you.”

Taking the role of the other

Sometimes, the instructor should ask, “What reasoning, or combination of circumstances, or history of events might have led reasonable and well-intended persons to engage in the behavior you observed?” It might be relatively easy to think of good or decent reasons why the teacher or student would have done that. For example, a student might be choosing to be bad rather than incompetent. Or it could be relatively easy to see how an ordinary mortal trying to do school would have been incited by a chain of events to do that, as when a teacher speaks sharply to a student. Or it could be hard but possible to see that the person acting might have had good reasons for doing so, as when a teacher is trying to choose the least bad of several bad options still open.

Taking the role of the other is essential both to maintaining a stance of respect toward teachers and pupils, and to teaching teacher candidates and interns to recognize the complexity and difficulty of teaching and learning for teachers and students. Instructors can promote the practice.

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5.  Then proceed to assessments

If the preceding principles have been well honored, it is then reasonable to attempt to make assessments.  These should be clearly based in careful description, carefully reasoned, and generous to the persons who produced the activity being discussed.

To get to the assessment, the instructor can ask,  “What educational goods are at stake in the situation with one or more hypotheses? Who could be gaining or losing what, depending on the hypothesis we choose about what might be going on? Is this educationally good, or bad, or a mix, or some kind of trade-off of one good for another?”

The assessment will be built on a comparison, an assertion that there is a difference or similarity between described activity and some other activity or standard or ideal. Getting clear about the comparison will go some way toward helping the instructor to decide what to do next, and toward helping the novices to learn to reason about teaching. Possibilities:

Ideals and reals

After questioning, the instructor could begin to think that the teacher candidate’s or intern’s assessment is based on a similarity or disparity between the novice’s own ideals for teaching and the teacher’s or students’ standards-driven or common practice. The instructor may be dealing with an unexamined ideal, or an unexamined practice, or a failure to appreciate aspects of the teacher’s or students’ practice, or a lack of generosity toward ordinary mortals trying to teach and learn.  All of these comparisons are teaching opportunities, worthy of discussion not only in TE classes but also among instructors in their groups.

Standards-oriented and common practices

The instructor could begin to think that the teacher candidate’s or intern’s assessment is based on a disparity or a similarity between a standards-driven practice (correctly understood by the candidate or intern) and the teacher’s use of the common practice. This may be an opportunity to conduct a little feasibility study: “What moves might have been made toward standards-driven practice in that same situation?”  It also is an opportunity to explore the challenges of the standards-driven practices, to consider the forms of support that teachers need to achieve those practices consistently, and to ask how the novices how they might take initiative, as new teachers, to organize that support.

Misperceptions and misconceptions

The instructor could begin to think that the teacher candidate’s or intern’s assessment is based on a misperception of the classroom activity, or on a misunderstanding (or debatable understanding) of standards-oriented or common practice. The instructor can go back to the generation of plausible hypotheses about the situation, or proceed to a review of the central features of the practices in question, or both.

Questionable practices and momentary lapses

The instructor could begin to think that the teacher candidate’s or intern’s description, carefully obtained by the instructor, appears to place the teacher’s and/or students’ activity in the category above called “questionable practice.” Depending on the way in which the practice has been called into question, the instructor may face any of several opportunities. One is to carefully analyze the described practice relative to standards-driven and common practices as they have been studied in the course.  Another is to explore the possibility of momentary lapses and the human realities of schooling. A third is to explore the forces that might push or lead human teachers and human students into questionable practices.  Then the instructor could ask if the teacher candidates or interns think they are human, or are exempt from the forces being discussed.

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6.  Recall the network of duties and relationships

Throughout, Throughout, try to keep in mind the teacher preparation program’s duties to school pupils, to their teacher as a colleague in the teacher preparation program, to the teacher’s school, and to the teacher candidate or interns  involved.  These responsibilities do not belong to the instructor alone; as members of the program, the teacher candidates and interns also bear them, and should learn increasingly to do so.

By and large, the move is to invoke the ethical frame that the instructor has established for the discussion, or to invoke ethical positions about teaching and learning, and to ask how it/they applies to the current moment of the discussion.

Summary

Activities in mentor teachers’ classrooms are vital material for a teacher preparation program, to be used with care for the pupils and teacher. The instructor can exercise that care by establishing and maintaining ethical ground rules for all discussions of activity in mentor teachers’ classrooms; by exploring with teacher candidates and interns their ideas about how they will learn from their practice work in schools; by eliciting careful descriptions of the classroom activity that interests them; by requiring and helping the novices to construct and compare alternative hypotheses about the activity and to make clearer the assumptions and stances they are bringing to the interpretation; by carefully exploring the comparisons being made in any assessment or evaluation; and by keeping in mind the program’s duties to school pupils, to their teachers as colleagues in the teacher preparation program, to the teachers’ schools, and to the teacher candidate or interns involved.

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