Learning to Mentor-as-Praxis: Foundations for a Curriculum in Teacher Education

The concept of mentoring has undergone a major shift from guide/guided or instructor/protege arrangements toward more reciprocal, collaborative models. Informed by a robust theoretical framework and real-life examples of successful and ineffective interactions, Learning to Mentor-as-Praxis analyzes in compelling detail how belief systems, ideologies, and values affect the mentoring relationship, why they are critical factors in today’s multicultural landscape, and how they can be used in the training of the next generation of mentors. In this proactive framework, learning to mentor is less a process of acquiring discrete skills and more the gaining of an interrelated set of competencies. At the same time, the book emphasizes the evolution of professional development—pre-service, in-service, and higher education—by focusing on these areas:Sociocultural and contextual aspects of mentoringLiterature review: acts and agency in mentoringAppreciation, participation, and improvisation: the key domains of praxisBuilding reciprocal interactions in dyads and groupsUsing challenges, paradoxes, and impassesGuidelines for designing and implementing a curriculum in mentor educationA bold reappraisal of current theory and practice and a new conceptualization of mentoring as domains of appreciation, participation and improvisation in praxis, Learning to Mentor-as-Praxis belongs in every academic library and on the shelves of researchers and professionals in mentoring, teacher education, and curriculum development.

My research focuses on the three complementary agendas within the field of Teacher Education: Mentoring and mentored learning, second language teacher learning and curriculum development. These agendas address the call for producing systematic research in the area of teacher education to inform theory, design, and implementation of educational reform and curricular innovation. In the area of mentoring, I have endeavored to conceptualize the passage from teaching to mentoring as a manifestation of the acquisition of professional expertise, as it relates to knowledge development, beliefs, morality, pedagogy, exemplary practice, and contextual and discursive aspects of professional practice . In the area of second language teacher learning, I have focused on aspects of the process of learning to teach a foreign language as related to the development of content knowledge, pedagogical beliefs and knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge . In the area of curriculum development, I have investigated the impact of educational interventions and new English curricula on English teachers and mentors’ pedagogical content knowledge development. I have also studied the impact of innovative curricular methodologies on graduate students’ learning in the context of Higher Education . My work as educational researcher in the above fields has contributed to the design of curriculum innovations in the area of mentoring and teacher education in Israel and abroad.