As education reform initiatives worldwide call for preservice teacher education programs to be “clinically rich”, i.e., transformed through lengthened and enriched clinical practice and experiences, extended student teaching has increasingly become the standard capstone experience for preservice teachers’ development (Kolman, Roegman, & Goodwin, 2017; Orland-Barak & Wang, 2021). Increased clinical practice suggests that preservice teachers often spend more time in K-12 schools than in university classrooms (Roegman, Reagan, Goodwin, & Yu,  2016), highlighting the critical role of mentor teachers in preservice teachers’ learning (Kang, 2021). Mentor teachers are the most influential actor shaping preservice teachers’ experiences in a clinical setting (Clarke, Triggs, & Nielsen, 2014; Wang & Odell, 2002) as preservice teachers spend a significant amount of time with them and interact with students under their guidance (Canipe & Gunckel, 2020; Izadinia, 2017).

Clinical practice enables preservice teachers to explore teaching as a career and develop professionally. Based on their experiences throughout the field placements, preservice teachers start to develop a realistic, more comprehensive image of the teacher they will be (Izadinia, 2017). These mental images, whether positive or negative, can impact new teachers’ success and longevity in the profession. This is of crucial importance since retaining teachers is highly challenging as beginning/novice teachers tend to leave the profession at a significant rate in the first five years, given low teacher efficacy, high occupational stress, emotional exhaustion, and perceived reality shock (Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll & Perda, 2012). Consequently, mentoring has repeatedly been underscored as a central component of high-quality teacher education programs and a key factor to retention in the early teaching career (Burger, Bellhäuser, & Imhof, 2021).

Based on increased calls for intensified school-based teacher education, clinically rich teacher education programs, specifically urban teacher residencies, are proliferating in the U.S. as they are designed to provide teacher candidates, called residents, with enriched immersion experiences within high-need urban schools to help them respond effectively to the needs of historically underserved students. This, therefore, urges investigation of what residents are learning throughout these enriched field placement experiences and the ways in which mentor teachers support their development in high-need urban schools, alongside the particular opportunities/challenges that they may face. Accordingly, this study aims to examine how residents in a federally granted urban teacher residency program in the U.S. reflect on their professional development as a result of their experiences with their mentor teachers. Drawing on Wang and Odell’s (2002) framework of three mentoring perspectives, namely, humanistic (e.g., providing emotional support), situated apprentice (e.g., providing technical knowledge and understanding of local context), and critical constructivist (e.g., engaging in collaborative inquiry), the study also investigates how mentor teachers work with residents to support their growth. Specifically, the study addresses these research questions:

1. What do residents’ reflections on their mentor teacher-mediated experiences suggest about their learning and professional development toward the program’s vision of teaching?
2. How do mentor teachers support residents’ learning and professional development throughout their field placement experiences?
3. What affordances/challenges influence the mentoring practices of mentor teachers?

Recent calls by the European Union (EU) highlight the urgent need in many member states for a comprehensive approach to teacher education at all levels, including initial teacher education with quality mentoring (European Union, 2020). Correspondingly, this study provides insights from a clinically rich teacher residency program in the U.S with a 10-year history of strong mentoring of preservice teachers by experienced teachers and high retention rates of its graduates. Lessons from this program can support initial teacher education programs and K-12 schools across EU member states in strengthening their mentoring practices for the development of quality teachers and effective faculty-school partnerships. 

The study was designed as a case study, which is an in-depth examination of “individuals”, “organizations”, or “programs” that are distinctive, and therefore are thoroughly explored within their real-life context, based on multiple sources of evidence (Yin, 2014). In this respect, this study is situated within a clinically rich urban teacher residency program that is funded by a U.S. Federal Teacher Quality Partnership grant and specifically designed to address the critical teacher shortages in a large urban district in a northeastern state of the USA by recruiting, preparing, and retaining academically talented diverse individuals from under-represented groups as highly qualified teachers who can capably meet the needs of children and youth attending schools in high-need, urban school districts. Collaborating with the local school district, preservice teachers are placed as teaching residents in a partnership school for a full school year and provided with intensive and immersive experiences within high-need urban schools, and assigned to work alongside experienced and exemplary mentor teachers who are selected using certain program criteria. Rather than short-term relationships and goals, residents spend three to four days a week in their residency placement throughout the entire academic year and work full-time with their mentor teachers–regarded as school-based teacher educators–to develop as whole teachers based on a synergistic blend of practice and theory. By drawing on multiple vantage points to conduct an in-depth exploration of the “case”, the data collection included 11 individual interviews with residents, 11 paired-interviews with the residents and their mentor teachers, 3 focus group interviews with the mentor teachers, and program-related documents such as teaching resident residency handbook and mentor teacher residency handbook. All interviews were semi-structured and conducted face-to-face. To that end, semi-structured interview protocols were developed by the program staff to conduct the individual, paired, and focus group interviews. Ensuring the participants’ permissions, all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data have been analyzed by content analysis method (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) using NVivo 10, which included an iterative process of both inductive coding (creating smaller codes and generating larger themes around them) and deductive coding (locating the generated themes around Wang and Odell’s (2002) three mentoring perspectives). Lastly, to ensure the trustworthiness of the study, several strategies were used to address the credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability of the research that will be presented further.

Preliminary analysis of individual resident interviews and paired resident-mentor interviews showed that the residents had several opportunities throughout their field placement to develop the practical knowledge and skills of teaching, which included but was not limited to developing relationships with K-12 students, developing knowledge and skills for instructional planning, engaging in co-planning and co-teaching, practicing classroom and time management, creating individualized education plans, and designing accessible, engaging, and student-centered learning environments. Our findings illuminated that the residents’ learning and professional development also reflected the residency program’s social justice-oriented vision of teaching toward inclusive and socially just classrooms. Concerning how mentor teachers contributed to the residents’ learning and professional development, our findings revealed that the mentoring practices, first, showed alignment with the humanistic perspective as mentor teachers often prioritized developing a good relationship with the residents, acknowledged their professional growth, and provided them with emotional support when they needed. Rooted in the situated apprentice perspective, the mentor teachers also supported the residents’ professional growth for developing the practical and technical aspects of teaching and getting to know the school context, mostly via providing feedback, debriefing, co-planning, and co-teaching. From a critical constructivist perspective, while the findings showed that the mentor teachers encouraged a collaborative knowledge construction with the residents, we found less evidence of emancipatory practices, in which mentors took the role of a change agent to transform schooling practices. Lastly, based on the focus groups with mentor teachers and the residency handbooks, we conclude that mentoring in this urban teacher residency program is mediated through several program-related factors (e.g., program philosophy, mentoring standards and expectations, mentor teacher selection and professional development) and school-related factors (e.g., school-level individuals, policies and practices) that can offer critical insights into teacher education programs to strengthen mentoring practices and support mentor teachers.

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