Since 2004, special efforts have been made to develop cooperation between the University of Helsinki Teacher Education and municipal schools. The network of teaching practice schools – besides university teacher training schools – has become an important part of teacher education for executing teaching practice periods in their schools. The cooperation raised so much interest at schools that during the years 2004–2008, 680 teachers from 207 different schools submitted applications. By ap-plying to the network of teaching practice schools, teachers demonstrated their willingness to participate in supervision courses. The supervision courses have been considered the most important form of cooperation guaranteeing the quality of the practicum. Teachers are educated to their twofold task: as a representative of the school, mentor teacher acts as an expert of school pedagogy; at the same time mentor teachers are implementing the curriculum of teacher education and in this respect, mentors serve in a university pedagogical role and are the university’s part-time teachers. This study aims to investigate teachers’ views of supervision that where produced during the course. Supervision views describe mentors’ purposiveness, in other words, supervision intentions. They refer to mentors’ focused action that reflects mentors conceptions of good teaching. As many researches have shown (e.g. Chi, Glaser & Farr, 1988), the awareness of the objects of education and the reflectivity connected to it, promotes teachers’ professional development towards expertise. The central orientation in teacher education is the development of teachers’ pedagogical thinking, requiring the ability to pedagogical decision-making (cf. Kansanen, 1995). Teaching practice is an essential part of teacher education. Especially, great meaning has the supervision dialogue between expert and novice, where the mentor helps the student to understand the guts of a topic and to pay attention to fundamental issues of instruction process. From the point of view of European teacher education it is important to create theories and models that are useful in analysing supervision and thinking. These models of theory have an implementation value in every context. Because of the meaning the supervision has to the student teacher, it is crucial that both sides – the mentor and the mentee as equals – when explicating their thinking, recognise also the reasons they have behind the pedagogical decisions. In this study, the theoretical roots originate from German didactics, especially Klafki’s (1985) theories about teaching where intentionality creates the foundation to decision-making. **continues in References

The participants of supervision course were asked to explicate their supervision view three times during the course.This research focuses on 156 participants’ views that were written in the beginning of supervision course in 2005. These writings comprised the data, from which the teachers’ pedagogical and supervision thinking were studied.The research is theoretically based on the model of teachers’ pedagogical thinking (Kansanen et. al, 2000, c.f.König, 1975) and on the model of mentoring intentions developed by Jyrhämä(2002). The three-stage struc-ture of mentoring intentions consists of six types of intentions that formed the basic categories in the content analysis of supervision views. When moving from the first stage to another the conceptionality of supervision intentions grow. That is, the emphasis of the supervision varies from the normative (how-answers) to the descriptive (why-questions).***

The results show that supervision views vary from action level to thinking levels of object theory and meta-theory and that those supervisions can be characterised as both normative and descriptive.Most of the mentoring intentions in teachers’ supervision views focused on the practical issues of teaching and supervision.These action level considerations concentrated on either giving models (22%) to student teachers or strengthening their self-confidence (45%).To the thinking level of object theories these supervision views moved when they showed mentoring intentions focused on learning interaction skills (18%) or developing teaching skills (14%). Supervision views showed very little mentoring intentions that would evidence metatheoretical thinking, striving at developing student teachers metacognitive skills (1%) or supporting their growing to ethical ways of action. The model of mentoring intentions can be used in supervision courses to help teaching practice supervisors to analyse their thinking and to attract their attention to all kinds of mentoring purposes.