The Use of Content Analysis to Explore Conversations between School Teacher Mentors and Student Teachers

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper describes research carried out within a school‐based model of teacher education and provides a case study of the use of content analysis as a research method. Mentors in school and tutors in a university planned in partnership a structured and integrated programme and within this, mentors agreed to discuss quite formally with pairs of student teachers their developing thinking on predetermined issues. These conversations were taped and subsequently analysed using content analysis. What was discovered from this quantitative analysis about conversations between school teacher mentors and student teachers was that whilst mentors seemed able to talk about their own practice, they seemed less successful in talking about practicability concerns they used in their decision‐making; in persuading student teachers to examine a range of sources to develop their thinking and in moving beyond ‘politeness’ to explore any lack of consensus between themselves and the student teachers.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: