Practica in schools provide pivotal learning opportunities for student teachers. This claim is supported by profession-specific learning theory (Gruber, 1999; Neuweg, 2002; Staub, 2004) as well as by the estimated effectiveness of practica by student teachers (Hascher et al, 2004; Hoppe-Graff et al., 2008).From a socio-constructivist perspective, lesson conferences are crucial events in this context: student teacher learning is expected to be fostered through the interaction with mentors who can draw on a vast and higly integrated knowledge base. In the last twenty years models of “reflective practice” are the prevalent approach for suggesting modes of interaction in lesson conferences (e.g. Feiman-Nemser, 2001). However, empirical studies shed a critical light on the dominant practice: mentors often focus on the evaluation of lessons. Reflective discourse moves can only rarely be found (Hennissen et al., 2008). Content-Focused Coaching (West & Staub, 2003) is a new model which suggests an active role for mentors: student teacher learning is expected to be advanced not only by reflective and dialogical post-lesson conferences but also by dialogic pre-lesson planning conferences and through direct assistance and co-constructive interaction. With the aim of evaluating this concept 16 cooperating teachers were trained as Content-Focused Coaches (Kreis & Staub, 2007). The intervention consisted in a substantial programme (120 hours over a period of 15 months) and was part of a quasi-experimental multi-method study. Lesson conferences were then subject to a discourse-analytical analysis (Henne & Rehbock, 2001) that aimed to develop a category system of discourse moves that are specific for lesson conferences (Kreis, in prep.). The category system was developed based on elements of Content Focused-Coaching and research on natural tutoring (eg. Graesser & Person, 1995) and elaborated based on data. It’s 42 codes capture the initiator of the sequence (cooperating or student teacher), the interactional character of the sequence (monological or dialogical), the function of the sequence with respect to the dialogue (e.g. assuring understanding, invitational respectively informative character of the sequence) and function of the sequence for the overall aims of the dialogue (e.g. elaborating the lesson plan, reflecting on a lesson, etc.). A comparison between lesson conferences of two contrasting groups with (a) a high or (b) low number of learning gains reported by student teachers (N_”high”=8 dyads of mentors/student teachers; N_”low”= 8 dyads) shows differences that indicate the impact of Content-Focused Coaching: dyads with high reported learning outcome do not only have post- but also pre-lesson conferences. Furthermore, their conferences are characterised by more dialogic sequences of interaction between mentors and student teachers than those of dyads with low numbers of reported learning gains.

With the present study we examine the effectiveness of the intervention with respect to participants’ discourse acts during lesson conferences by comparing lesson conferences of the intervention group with those of an untrainded control-group of cooperating teachers for systematic differences in the occurrence of discourse moves that have been found to be associated with high or low reported learning gains.

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