Mentor pedagogy and student teacher professional development: A study of two mentoring relationships

The recent and growing literature on mentoring has seen a lot of studies focusing on how mentors think about and conceptualise their work. There has been less which has examined what mentors actually do in practice or which attempts to relate mentors' 'espoused' theories to their 'theories in action'. This study elicits two mentors' conceptions of their role, along with their views about what has influenced these conceptions, before examining the pedagogical practice of the two mentors. Secondly, the study looks at how three student teachers respond to their experiences of mentoring with these same two mentors, and attempts to understand the various ways in which the student teachers' thinking about their teaching is influenced by discussions with their mentor. The article concludes with a discussion of the agency of the mentoring relationship in learning to teach. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.