The teacher's professional development seems to depend on the quality of mentor. While some school teachers have been able to learn from their own practice, others cannot have learned well. If there is a good mentor in a school, all school teachers are easy to learn from their own teaching through interaction with a mentor. One of the key problems as to teacher professional development is the expertise of a mentor in a school-based teacher education, like a lesson study. The teacher’s professional development is facilitated by the interaction among school teachers, which means that the effectiveness of the learning community of school teachers is dependent on the quality of mentors. Some management organization studies pointed out that an essential factor to create a new knowledge for a new product is a knowledge coach or a transformer. A knowledge coach should have a measure of professional knowledge, and they must have a motivation to teach and support other members and obtain how to teach/support to them(Leonard,D., Swap,W.,2005). A transformer should have the knowledge to transform a personal practical knowledge into the understandable explanations for other members(Harada,1999). Similarly, each school should have a knowledge coach or a transformer to develop a specific curriculum and support each school teacher’s professional development. The functions of mentoring have been identified (Kram,1985;Noe,1988;Scandura & Katterburg,1988). However, they have not well been identified in school-based teacher education. In Japan there is no formal mentoring, but as a kind of mentoring all novices must take the in-service teacher training program for one year. This program consists of 2 training courses, which one is training within school and the other is out of school. In training within school, a mentor takes on the job of teaching/coaching for 4 beginning teachers. In training out of school, some supervisors give lectures about Education Act, teaching, classroom management, etc. at the prefecture educational training institute and beginning teachers engage in social service during summer vacation. The former is not always working because of the individual differences of mentors. In consideration of this situation, this study explores how a mentor plays the role in mentoring in a school based on the notions of some management organization studies. The main purpose of this study is to explore what comments a mentor gives to his/her mentee with observing mentee’s teaching to identify the nature of a mentor.

The subjects are 3 mentors and 4 novice teachers(one mentor took charge of 2 novice teachers). 3 mentors are male. 3 novice teachers are male and the other is female. 3 pairs are elementary school teachers and 1 pair is secondary school teachers. We recorded each mentor’s on-going comments to each mentee’s teaching by IC recorder, and recorded mentee’s lessons by 2 video cameras in June and October in 2006 and February in 2007. We made transcriptions and classified them according to the developed category system. And then all comments were analyzed by morphologic analysis and the extracted words were analyzed by correspondence analysis. We compared elementary school mentor with secondary school mentor. And the comments to 2 novices by the same elementary school mentor were compared.

Mentor’s comments were mainly 4 categories; to give instructions, to suggest alternatives, to point the problem of teaching, and to praise. In comparison elementary school mentor with secondary school mentor, they had one thing in common. About 20% of their comments were ‘to praise. While the secondary school mentor tended to suggest alternatives, the elementary school mentor gave instructions and alternatives at the same rate. As to the comments to 2 novices, the mentor counseled them individually. One novice with a part time teaching experience was given the comment to point the problem of teaching. Another novice with no teaching experience was given instructions. As above, the findings suggested that the following characteristics are required to mentors; 1)how to motivate mentees,2)how to hand down mentor’s practical knowledge and skills. Furthermore this study is expected to lead to how to establish the teacher learning community within a school.