There is increasing pressure on Education Preparation Providers to provide clinically rich opportunities for interns that are connected with and embedded in local schools. Providing these clinically rich opportunities has become the primary responsibility of the mentor teachers that oversee the development of the interns placed in their schools. If mentor teachers are to become teacher educators, they need greater support to develop educative mentoring practices. The purpose of this study was to learn more about the experiences of mentor teachers as they applied educative mentoring strategies and to discover how their professional learning could be supported by Education Preparation Providers. This qualitative study, based on the experiences of six secondary level mentor teachers that mentored interns in year-long placements, interviewed them about their personal histories and values, captured specific mentoring moments with their interns, and conducted reflective interviews about their current mentoring practices. The central research question was: How do mentors use their knowledge and/or vision of teaching to provide learning opportunities for their interns? Four additional supportive questions were asked to provide a more robust picture of the mentor teachers' practices: ¥ How do mentors determine the professional development needs of their interns?¥ How do mentor teachers explicitly or implicitly use their knowledge and values about teaching in their mentoring of interns? ¥ What strategies do mentor teachers use to promote reflection on the part of interns?¥ How can experienced mentors continue to learn about mentoring? The results of this study showed that mentor teachers utilized a variety of mentoring strategies to develop the interns' vision of teaching. These methods allowed them to move beyond the transmission model of mentoring to a more transformative stance grounded in the values of educative mentoring.
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