Prospective teachers (PSTs) have consistently identified clinical field experiences (e.g., student teaching) to be the most important experience in their teacher preparation (Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002). One way that mentors support prospective teachers’ development within field placements is through conversations about classroom teaching. In this dissertation, I consider educative conversations as a product of educative mentoring (Feiman-Nemser, 1998) and teacher noticing (Sherin & van Es, 2002). I explore the nature and quality of these mentoring conversations and I consider the potential of using noticing and wondering language (Smith, 2009) in making mentoring conversations more educative.This dissertation study focused on three secondary education mentor-intern pairs who participated in a short orientation session offering Smith’s (2009) noticing and wondering language for framing mentoring conversations. Participating interns were PSTs in their final year of a five-year teacher preparation program. Participating mentor teachers were all veteran who had a wealth of experience mentoring PSTs. The data for this dissertation were audio-recordings of pre/post conversations about video episodes of someone else’s teaching, sample mentoring conversations, and individual interviews.This dissertation is composed of an introductory chapter, three journal article manuscripts, and a concluding chapter. The introductory and concluding chapters are reflective sections about the dissertation research process addressing my dissertation committee members as their main audience. The three journal article manuscripts focus on particular aspects of mentoring conversations and are intended to stand alone as complete manuscripts.In the first manuscript, intended for mathematics teacher educators, I describe the short orientation session that offered mentor-intern pairs the language of noticing and wondering as a way to structure mentoring conversations. I also explore the ways mentors and PSTs adopted the language of noticing and wondering in pre/post conversations about video of someone else’s teaching after participating in the short orientation session. Moreover, the first manuscript details the ways the language of noticing and wondering supported mentors and PSTs to adopt an interpretive stance when discussing teaching practice. In the second manuscript, intended for teacher education researchers, I formulated a theorized definition of an educative conversation and used it to identify potentially educative mentoring episodes by applying indicators of educative conversations to pre/post conversations about video episodes of someone else’s teaching. I further report on the nature and quality of these conversations, and consider the potential of using noticing and wondering language in making mentoring conversations more educative. Additionally, I explore ways in which such noticing and wondering language may or may not support productive mentoring conversations. Lastly, I explore three approaches for analyzing mentoring conversations in the third manuscript. Each approach is illustrated with the same mentor-intern pair’s conversations to discuss affordances and limitations of each approach. Also intended for teacher education researchers, I consider how each approach can be used to decompose the practice of mentoring conversations to contribute to developing a knowledge base about effective mentoring conversations and support professional development for mentors.
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