What Mathematics Mentor Teachers Decide: Intervening in Practice Teachers’ Teaching

In this paper, we mainly investigate, through the pedagogical critical incidents of practice (CIPs), the ways mathematics mentor teachers intervene in the teaching of practice teachers, and the reasons and underlying values for their interventions, based on case studies of a group of 8 mentor-practice teachers and their student classes in secondary schools. When watching practice teachers’ teaching, due to lack of professional knowledge and experiences, mentors may get the feeling that their students are confused about the teaching, or situations of classrooms are not under their control, so that they must deal with the situations at the moment. One general technique mentors might have used is to “intervene-in-action” of practice teachers, when the CIPs appear. According to our raw data, we distinguish the forms of mentor teachers’ on-the-spot interventions into three major categories: “active”, “passive”, and “no” intervention. Two subcategories “direct” and “indirect” intervention are also salient within “active intervention”. The preliminary results show that (1) the reasons and ways of mentor teachers’ interventions were varied; and (2) mentor teachers developed frameworks of mentoring decision-making closely related to the specific modes of intervention that they chose.