UC Irvine

This dissertation takes on a key and persistent challenge within teacher education: pre-service teacher learning in field experience. I approach this historical problem through its local manifestations, and this study examines an intervention that brought together three university supervisors and six classroom mentor teachers from one university-school partnership for seven meetings over the six months of student teaching. Framed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the emergent design of the Mentoring Study Group intervention aimed to provoke expansive learning (Engeström, 1987; 2001) to transform how practitioners understand their work and to support them in constructing new tools and concepts for practice for themselves. Qualitative methods were used to examine the key problems of practice participants identified, the new tools and concepts for practice they developed, and to interpret learning in terms of the expansive learning conceptual model to understand how features of the model design enabled the group to broaden their understanding and coordinate their work. Results demonstrate that through participation in the structured collaboration offered by the emergent professional development approach, participants were able to uncover a fundamental contradiction embedded within teacher preparation, between goals of helping pre-service teachers develop ambitious instructional practice and preparing pre-service teachers to lead “formula lessons.” In attempting to confront and resolve this contradiction, the Mentoring Study Group devised a shared tool to coordinate their work, The Five High-Leverage Math Practices +1 Protocol and field-based pedagogical practices to guide modeling, observations, and feedback on teaching. This model of structured collaboration for teacher education practitioners holds promise for university-school partnership efforts to come together to develop shared approaches to mentoring and a common language of practice for the purpose of preparing beginning teachers for ambitious practice in the field.