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Student-Teacher Relationships in Teacher Program Education s

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The learning contained in this example may result unsubstantial for many readers but, in essence, it illustrates a genuine piece of knowledge that is often displayed in schools and has been long time neglected in Teacher Education Programs. Making the student to use the dictionary may be not among any canonical response to the problem (not knowing the concept of condensation). It may be thought that it should have been better to tell the Student Teacher to prepare more consciously the key concepts of the lesson next time. We agree. But we also believe that any form of knowledge should be considered valid as far as it is useful when dealing with practical situations. For us we have in this example, in the very end, an expert teacher’s …show more content…

The mentoring interactions portray habitual classroom situations that help thinking over particular Student Teachers’ performance (Clarke, 2001) eliciting, as a consequence, tacit knowledge that is only in the expert teacher’ mind. These genuine interactions between an expert teacher and a student teacher triggers critical reflection processes on teaching experiences and invites to further think of what can be done in similar future situations. In this chapter our objective is twofold: On one hand we aim at (1) stressing the relevance of seizing the practical knowledge that emerge in mentoring conversations –as the one contained in the previous example- leaving other aspects of the interaction behind (i.e. personal engagement, emotional commitment, roles, etc.); and, on the other hand, (2) describing a possible procedure that may help to make that practical knowledge not only explicit but also understandable and useful for other teachers. Along these lines, and according to the objectives, we will structure the chapter into two major sections: theoretical underpinnings in teacher mentoring; and methods to analyze mentoring interactions. The first one will revolve around positioning research efforts around three main viewpoints and highlighting the branch that actually stress that mentoring is a form of making expert teachers’ practical knowledge accessible/explicit. We will end that section by stating that practical knowledge not only

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