Key focus areas and use of tools in mentoring conversations during internship in initial teacher education

•We examine and compare mentoring conversations in two conditions.•Key focus areas in mentoring conversations differ between the two conditions.•Presence and use of tools differ.•The importance of the Lesson Study booklet as the primary tool in the intervention.•Extended collaboration between university lecturers and mentor teachers.

Internship is assumed to have an impact on student teachers' learning. In this paper, mentoring conversations during internship in two different conditions are analysed through ‘thin descriptions’. Comparisons between a Business-As-Usual condition and a Lesson Study approach condition show differences between focus areas and tools present. These differences are discussed with a point of departure in activity theory where mediating tools is a central concept, arguing that teacher education institutions and mentor teachers need to collaborate in developing useful tools stimulating student teachers to make enquiries into the core issues of teaching.