The extent to which mentor teachers are able to address mentees' individual needs is an important factor in the success of mentoring. A two-dimensional model of mentor teacher roles in mentoring dialogues, entitled MERID, is explored empirically. Data regarding five aspects of mentoring dialogues were collected, using a sample of 20 transcriptions of mentoring dialogues, in which 112 topics were discussed and 440 mentor teacher utterances emerged. Correlations between the five aspects were determined and a cluster analysis was conducted. There is empirical support for the model. It is a useful framework to promote reflection on mentor teachers' supervisory behaviour.
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The purpose of this final chapter is twofold: (1) to provide the synthesis of learnings on quality in teaching and teacher education on the basis of the analysis and discussion of the fourteen chapters collected in this monograph, and (2) to discuss implications for future research on quality in teaching and teacher education, policy and practice. In so doing, we ask: What do we know about quality in teaching and teacher education from the collected chapters and how can these findings inform future research, policy and practice in these areas? In order to answer these questions, the chapter is divided into five main parts. In the first part we identify a call that is present in all chapter: to move beyond a reductionist notion of education. In the second part we recognize the growing attention for teaching quality both as a blessing and a burden. In the third part we identify seven key dilemmas that arise from the different chapters. Next we use these dilemmas to identify implications for teacher education practice, policy and research. We conclude this chapter with some final reflections.
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Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
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