This study presents insights on innovative learning methods in teacher education by exploring use of tools to enhance mentoring conversations. The contribution zooms in on mentor support for preservice teachers (PTs) and peer mentoring among mentors. Two settings were examined: mentor pairs facilitating PTs’ group discussions on classroom videos from PTs’ own practicum teaching, and mentors mentoring each other on their facilitation and mentoring quality. By using classroom videos, mentoring practice videos and conversation guides, the study adapted a framework on moves that facilitate enquiry-based conversations in group settings. The findings demonstrate two mentoring approaches: evaluative and exploratory. Further, the study revealed how mentoring pairs approached peer mentoring of each other in a similar way to their PT group mentoring.

An exploratory approach to practice and an emphasis on collaboration and cooperative learning appear to be crucial for PTs to learn from their practical experiences (Garza et al., 2019; Kang, 2021). However, the facilitation of such learning processes can be challenging for mentors who lack formal mentor training and lead them to revert to the traditional unidirectional mentoring models that they themselves experienced as PTs (Garza et al., 2019). Innovative mentoring arrangements transcending traditional mentor–mentee arrangements have received growing attention in the research literature (Garza et al., 2019; Hunskaar & Gudmundsdottir, 2023; Hunskaar & Lejonberg, 2024). Practice-based teacher education programmes aim to not only facilitate PTs’ development of teaching skills but also target the development of their understanding and interpretations of the practices they observe, thus making pedagogical reasoning a central aspect (Jenset, 2024). Through reasoning about teaching within mentoring conversations, mentors aim to support PTs in recognising and articulating practical knowledge (Mena et al., 2017). The use of conceptual and practical tools, such as videos and conversation guides, can support reasoning processes, and serve as artefacts around which such mentoring conversations can be structured (Nesje and Lejonberg, 2022).

In this study, our aim is twofold: first, to shed light on how mentors can support PTs’ learning during tool-based mentoring conversations, and second, to illuminate how tool-based peer mentoring can be used in a mentor education programme to support mentors’ professional development. We examine two settings in which two types of tools are in play to support the mentoring conversation: one technological and one discursive. The first setting examines a group mentoring conversation in which a mentor pair facilitates PT’s group conversations about classroom videos from their own teaching during practicum. The second setting examines a conversation involving mentors mentoring each other about the quality of each other’s facilitation of PT group discussions. Classroom videos, videos of mentors’ mentoring practices from the first setting and conversation guides are used to support and structure the discussions in the two settings.

Conceptually, we are inspired by a framework developed by van Es et al. (2014) proposing four distinct practices and related moves that facilitate enquiry-based conversations in group settings using practice videos. This framework invites an investigation of the interactions between mentors and PTs when the mentors support PTs in using videos as a basis for learning from their own practical experiences. In our analysis of the quality of the conversation of the mentors mentoring each other, we draw on concepts from Hennissen et al. (2008) describing various mentoring roles, as well as Garza et al.’s (2019) conception of mentoring paradigms. We investigate the practices and moves employed by the mentors in relation to the approaches to the mentor role.

The data for this study included video recordings of conversations in the two learning designs. The group mentoring conversations, in which the mentor pairs facilitated PT group conversations about their classroom videos, lasted 69 minutes for Group A and 71 minutes for Group B. The conversations between the two mentors in each pair after the facilitation of PT group discussions was completed lasted 83 minutes for the mentors in Group A and 75 minutes for the mentors in Group B. All conversations were transcribed. Analytical Approach – Facilitation of Peer Group Mentoring The analysis of mentors’ facilitation of PTs’ peer mentoring was conducted in several phases. In the first phase of the analysis we identified sequences in which conversations about PT practice videos were facilitated by mentors. We identified a total of five sequences, three in one group and two in the other. In the second phase, we performed a turn-taking analysis to investigate the amount of talk between mentors and PTs. Turn-taking analysis uses utterances as separate units by following the principle of turn-taking (Crasborn & Hennissen, 2010; Hennissen et al., 2011). After familiarising ourselves with the data, and in the process of conducting turn-taking analysis, we found that two groups of mentors and PTs had clear differences in the way they approached the mentoring and in the substantial focus of the conversations, while the sequences taken from within each group struck us as characterised by similarities. Therefore, we treat the two groups as two cases. In the third phase, we analysed the substance of the conversations within and across five sequences by coding the mentors’ turns of talking using an adapted version of coding categories in the facilitation framework by van Es et al. (2014). This facilitation framework consists of four categories that reflect central practices for using video in productive ways (van Es et al., 2014, p. 346): orienting the group towards the video analysis task, analytical stances, maintaining a focus on the video and supporting group collaboration (see Table 1). In the fifth phase, we provided a detailed description of the conversations in the two cases. In the thick description, we utilised the codes from the framework by van Es et al. (2014) to display the differences in mentor teachers’ talk moves within the conversations.

The findings of this study demonstrated that mentors approached the task of facilitating PTs’ exploration of their teaching practices during tool-based mentoring conversations in quite different ways (RQ1). Furthermore, the findings showed that the mentor students’ approaches to facilitating the PT group conversations aligned with the approaches employed in the peer mentoring conversations between the two mentors (RQ2). The two pairs of mentors adopted very different approaches in terms of how directive and active they were in mentoring situations (Hennissen et al., 2008), the extent to which they facilitated an enquiry-based approach to their analyses of the classroom videos (van Es et al., 2014) and how evaluative and advisory they were (Hennissen et al., 2008). The mentors in Group B had an exploratory approach to their own and their colleague’s guidance, while the pair in Group A were concerned with what worked and what the PTs’ could have been done better. To a limited extent, the mentors in Group A raised the conversation to explore practice. When it came to video-based mentoring, the pair in Group B highlighted emotional safety as an important issue. Findings indicate the importance of supporting mentors in their professional development. For instance, incorporating multiple similar activities over time could provide mentors with the opportunity to observe themselves over time and develop their adaptive expertise. The use of tools such as videos and conversation guides designed to foster exploratory and focused discussions between pre-service teachers and mentors holds potential as ‘curricular frames’ (Kang & Windschitl, 2018) in mentor education. However, the emphasis should be on the pedagogical rationale and underlying goals, not merely on the use of tools per se, which should be rooted in a comprehensive pedagogical approach (Nesje & Lejonberg, 2022; Kang & Windschitl, 2018).

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