Honoring interns' teaching ideas: Negotiating dilemmas in the expert-novice learning dialogue

Expert-novice learning dialogues are a central means of teaching and learning throughout society. Such dialogues are particularly common in teacher education, where experienced and novice teachers converse regularly in their daily reflection and planning conversations. While many scholars have studied the nature and content of mentor-intern conversations during student teaching experiences, there has been relatively little investigation into how such dialogues honor the teaching ideas interns bring to the classroom, or the challenges of honoring these ideas in joint planning conversations.; This study investigated mentor-intern co-planning conversations as an example of a learning dialogue between an expert and novice planner. Through this lens, this study describes and analyzes mentor-intern co-planning conversations to uncover the various challenges mentors and interns encounter as they attempt to engage in conversations about interns' teaching ideas. Specifically, it explores the potentials and pitfalls of this hierarchical learning dialogue as a context for discussing and developing interns' teaching ideas in the process of learning to plan and teach.; This study looks closely at the co-planning conversations of two mentor-intern pairs. Drawing on theory and methods from ethnography and sociolinguistics, the following data were collected and analyzed: initial interviews with interns and mentors; videotapes of mentor-intern co-planning conversation; audiotaped viewing sessions where the mentors and interns talked about these videotaped interactions; audiotaped co-planning conversations; field notes; and interns' lesson plans.; Analyses of the co-planning conversations revealed several findings about the challenges of engaging in educative dialogue about interns' ideas in co-planning conversations. Together, these findings suggest that engaging in authentic dialogue about interns' teaching ideas requires mentors and interns to talk and interact in ways that run counter to their institutional identities, discourse, and working relationship. Findings from the analyses include: (1) mentors' and interns' institutional discourse and identities limit discussion of interns' teaching ideas; (2) the participants co-plan in ways consistent with the "official" space and scripts of planning; co-planning around interns' ideas requires engagement in a "Third Space" (Gutierrez & Stone, 2000); (3) honoring interns' ideas requires a degree of joint engagement and transformation that is difficult to achieve in the school context; and (4) it is difficult for mentors to release (and interns to accept) control of the planning in the context of their joint work.; This study provides a window into the complexities of mentor-intern learning dialogues that informs the work of teachers and teacher educators who learn and teach through conversation. It offers implications about the preparation of mentors and interns for their joint work. In particular, the study asks teacher educators to: (1) think harder about models of mentoring that draw on expert-novice dialogue; (2) expand teaching and mentoring expertise and identity to include engaging as co-learners with novice teachers; (3) rethink how we define assistance and assessment for preservice teachers; and (4) develop cross-institutional networks to build shared language and knowledge for preparing teachers.