Many consider mentor-teachers as key players who considerably influence student-teachers’ process of learning to teach (Ellis et al., 2020). Therefore, there is a growing interest in improving teacher mentoring, and different studies focus their attention on that matter providing guidelines and criteria for productive mentoring. These tend to prefer collaborative and non-hierarchical mentoring (Ellis et al., 2020) and stress the importance of developing student-teachers’ pedagogical thinking (Norman & Feiman-Nemser, 2005; Stanulis et al., 2018). In reality, nevertheless, some mentors prefer to focus on transferring their practical knowledge of teaching rather than engaging in a collaborative reflection with their student-teachers on teaching and learning (Guise et al., 2017).

These competing mentoring values and goals – transferring and acquiring practical knowledge versus developing conceptual understanding – somewhat parallel the discourse regarding teacher professionalism and its perpetual debate regarding the nature of teaching – whether it is a profession or a craft (Houston, 2009). Traditionally, professions have been considered to ground their practice upon theoretical knowledge (Freidson, 2001), and education has been considered a semi-profession (Etzioni, 1969) with a non-scientific knowledge base. This interpretation of the nature of teaching implies that student-teachers are similar to apprentices who need to acquire practical knowledge. In response, some claimed that teachers hold and use multiple sophisticated knowledge bases that guide their professional discretion (Shulman, 1987). Others acknowledged that teachers’ knowledge is often too practical and personal and stressed the need to close the gap between educational theory and practice (Hiebert et al., 2002; Nuthall, 2004; Stigler & Thompson, 2009).

Realizing educators’ endeavor to professionalize teaching can offer an explanation to the abovementioned trends in teacher mentoring. The apprenticeship style of mentoring is based on hierarchical relations between an established master and his protégé, in which the latter can acquire skills without always understanding their underpinning logic (Agyemang & Boateng, 2019). Namely, he may learn how to perform well without understanding why one course of action would lead to better results than another. This mentoring style is often associated with craftsmanship, which may explain why many educators dismiss it as unproductive, preferring the non-hierarchical style that prioritizes developing pedagogical thinking over pedagogical practices.

The issue here is not with the important efforts of educators trying to professionalize teaching and improve mentoring. Rather, it is with the bipolar thinking about teachers’ professionalism and teacher mentoring. Namely, teaching is typically analyzed upon the continuum between craft on one pole and profession on the other, between disconnecting and reconnecting practice and theory. Mentoring is analyzed on the continuum between hierarchical relations and collaborative and egalitarian relations, between developing student-teachers’ skills and developing their thinking (figure 1).

Another perspective describes a threefold model of the teaching profession, constituted of theory, practice, and the teacher’s self, aspects that interrelate with three metaphors depicting teachers’ trade – the teacher as an intellectual, the teacher as a craftsperson, and the teacher as an artist (Author, 2020). This study used this perspective to analyze mentoring relationships in order to unpack the essence of productive mentoring. This complicated the analysis process and the emerging conclusions. Instead of asking whether and how accomplished mentor-teachers’ practice promoted their student-teachers’ (as well as their own) professionalism, I tried to understand what type of professionalism it promoted.

The research questions were:

-          What are the characteristics of the mentoring that accomplished mentor-teachers provide?

-          What are the differences and similarities between different accomplished mentor-teachers?

-          What mentoring styles emerge from comparing different accomplished mentors?

-          What visions of teacher professionalism do these mentoring styles represent?

The research is based on a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2014), and comprises ten cases, each focusing on one mentoring relationship from diverse perspectives. This approach allowed me to compare horizontally between mentors in different cases because they all worked under similar conditions (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). Context The mentoring relationships were between mentor-teachers and student-teachers who participated in three preparation programs that operated under a teacher preparation policy called Academia-Classroom initiated by the Ministry of Education in Israel. The policy required student-teachers to take part in an intensive practicum consisting of two days per week during the school year with a mentor-teacher who co-taught alongside them. Participants The case study methodology requires careful sampling (Creswell, 2013). Thus, purposeful sampling was applied (Patton, 2002) based on recommendations from university supervisors, school principals, and vice-principals for accomplished mentors. Such recommendations-based sampling is common and was used in similar studies (Tamir & Hammerness, 2014; Williams, 2014). Participants in each case included: the mentor-teacher, the student-teacher, the university supervisor, the preparation program coordinator, the school vice-principal, a teacher-colleague from school. Data collection In each case, I interviewed each of the participants and conducted an observation of the interaction between mentors and student-teachers in schools. In total, I gathered approximately 63 hours of interviews and 48.5 hours of observations. Using multiple perspectives of diverse participants as well as the observations allowed triangulation of the findings (Flick, 2018). Analysis The analysis consisted of three main stages. First, it used a field grounded approach (Charmaz, 2014) that allowed developing an analytic categorization based on all the gathered data. The categorization consisted of 7 Contents of Mentoring (CM) (goals that mentor-teachers promoted) categories and 6 Mentoring Practices (MP) (that mentor-teacher used) categories. I elaborate on this process as well as the emerging categorization elsewhere (Author, 2021). The second stage included an analysis of each case separately using the emerging categorization. This allowed characterizing each mentor by his dominant CM and MP. The multiple data sources were crucial in this stage, as they supported determining which categories were indeed dominant according to multiple perspectives and which characterized a mentor only according to one person’s perspective. The third stage included a comparison between mentors in different cases. This allowed indicating similarities and differences between the cases and constructing 4 mentoring styles that emerged from the 10 cases.

The 10 mentors worked according to 4 mentoring styles, each focusing on different contents of mentoring and mentoring practices corresponding with different professional visions (table 1). The first was the apprenticeship model in which mentors focused on directly guiding student-teachers’ practice. The second was the collaborative-experiential model in which mentor-teachers provided contextual knowledge and organizational support and experimented with their student-teachers and co-created with them new learning processes for their students. The third was the personal-experiential model in which mentors also focused on contextual knowledge and organizational support and encouraged their student-teachers to experiment and create new learning processes. However, as mentors, they did not participate in these processes but mainly observed them and provided outside support. The fourth was the cognitive model in which mentor-teachers exposed student-teachers to challenges and focused on explaining and examining with their student-teachers their pedagogical reasoning. Table 1 #/Mentoring style/Main characteristics/Professional vision 1/Apprenticeship/The mentor provides knowledge and directs mentees’ actions/Teacher as craftsperson 2/Collaborative-experiential/The mentor and the mentee co-create teaching and learning/Teacher as artist 3/Personal-experiential/The mentor provides adequate conditions for the mentee to create teaching and learning/Teacher as artist 4/Cognitive/The mentor exposes the mentee to growing challenges and together they analyze them and co-construct professional knowledge/Teacher as intellectual In reality, each mentor acted according to more than one of these styles and their corresponding professional visions, however, they all had one style that better depicted their personal mentoring approach. The fact that all these mentoring styles and their interrelating professional visions characterized accomplished mentor teachers suggests that mentoring styles that depart from the endeavor to make teaching a theoretical-knowledge-based profession may benefit student-teachers. Moreover, maybe we should rethink some of our assumptions regarding productive mentoring (Ellis et al., 2020; Norman & Feiman-Nemser, 2005).

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