Learning to teach in an urban school: Influences affecting a mentor teacher-student teacher relationship

Public schools are in a teacher shortage crisis; two million teachers will need to be hired in the next ten years. Even though the problem of the shortage of teachers is nation-wide, it is more acute in urban school districts: half of their new teachers leave within three to five years (Haberman & Rickards, 1990). The teacher shortage and retention crisis of urban schools will not improve simply by recruiting more teachers if those teachers follow the current pattern of leaving early in their careers. New insights into mentoring student teachers can inform the ways in which we re-conceptualize teacher education programs, to better prepare teachers to remain in and be effective in urban teaching positions. This qualitative case study of the influences affecting a mentor teacher---student teacher relationship in an urban school student teaching placement expands the current knowledge base of teacher education research and mentoring research. Through in-depth case study research methodology, the operationalization of day-to-day mentoring, the ways in which the mentor teacher and student teacher interact and the impact of that interaction on the student teacher's classroom practice, and the ways in which the urban context affected the mentoring situation were examined. The theoretical framework of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) allowed for the examination of both the individual teacher and the multiple contexts the mentor teacher and the student teacher had to navigate during the student teaching, from the smaller classroom situation to the larger district mandates. Through interviews, audio recordings of planning meetings, classroom observations, and dialogue journal entries, the findings revealed that there were four strands of influence on the mentoring relationship: Experiences and Personal Dispositions of the subjects; the School Culture; the student teacher's University Teacher Preparation Program; and the ESL student teaching classroom placement. These four strands of influence mediated the mentoring the student teacher received and created the context for their relationship. Especially informative were the sites of tension within the strands of influence, as those sites revealed the often contradictory mentoring the mentor teacher provided. Implications from this study include the need to better select and train mentor teachers, further examination of the tension between the university coursework and student teaching reality, examination of how tensions and contradictions shape the reproduction of a community of practice, the realization that the student teacher practicum was not a traditional apprenticeship, and the need for more case studies on mentoring.