In the Netherlands, just as in many other countries, teacher students are more and more educated in school-teacher education partnerships. In order to realise opportunities to learn for and from work we designed a collaborative mentoring approach based on collaborative lesson preparation, evaluation and enactment of lessons. First, enactment is done by the mentor, then by the mentor and the student teacher collaboratively and finally by the student teacher (Van Velzen et al., 2012).

      Co-teaching as mentoring tool is rather unusual because of the fear for intervening student teachers’ teaching and/or simple imitating mentor teachers’ behaviour by the student teacher. Nevertheless we know student teachers must be able to learn to perform teaching and many of the most difficult aspects of teaching lie in the interactive dimensions of practice (Grossman et al., 2009). We also know a classroom is an unpredictable environment asking for instantaneous decisions and student teachers and teacher educators are confronted with the problem that hardly any opportunity exists to gradually immerse in it (Gardner & Williamson, 2007).

Co-teaching with mentors who model, guide, enhance and challenge student teachers’ interpretations and responses however, can enhance student teachers’ learning while teaching (Edwards, Gilroy, & Hartley, 2002). Co-teaching helps student teachers to act on a proximal level they are not yet able to reach on their own. This type of guidance is also known as scaffolding (Warford, 2011) offering a kind of support providing for opportunities for learning to teach and for guidance needed to safeguard the quality of their learning as of their work (Guile and Young, 2003).

Scaffolding provides for a learning environment in which a student teacher actually can act as a teacher in a way Lave & Wenger (1991) coined as legitimately peripheral participation in a community of practice. Legitimacy refers to the extent to which the student teacher is treated as a potentially full member of the community and can become visible for instance in the shared responsibility for the whole enacted process, whether and how they give space to each other (Roth and Tobin, 2004) and how they address each other in front of pupils.

According to Wenger (1998) peripherality can be realised by for instance special assistance and close supervision, lessened risk, less production pressure or less cost of error. Next to these mentoring tools critically modelling experienced teacher behaviour provides for student teachers learning from and in practice (e.g. Loughran, 2006).

Our study was based on the following research questions:

1.      How is the co-teaching prepared and discussed?

2.      How is legitimacy supported during co-teaching?

3.      How is peripherality supported during co-teaching

a.       Which scaffolding actions are used by the mentor during co-teaching?

b.    Which modelling actions are used by the mentor during co-teaching?

Edwards, A., Gilroy P., & Hartley, D. (2002). Rethinking teacher education: collaborative responses to uncertainty. London: Routledge. Erickson, F. (2006) Definition and analysis of data from videotape: some research procedures and their rationales. In: J. Green, G. Camilli, & P. Elmore (Eds.) Handbook of complementary methods in education research (pp. 177-192). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gardner, C., & Williamson, J. (2007). The complexities of learning to teach: “Just what is it that I am doing”? In T. Townsend & R. Bates (Eds.), Handbook of Teacher Education, (pp. 691-710). Springer: Dordrecht. Grossman, P., Compton, C., Igra, D., Ronfeldt, M., Shahan, E., & Peter Williamson, P. (2009). Teaching Practice: A Cross-Professional Perspective. Teachers College Record, 111, 2055-2100. Guile, D., & Young, M. (2003). Transfer and transition in vocational education: Some theoretical considerations. In T. Tuomi-Gröhn, & Y. Engeström (Eds.), Between school and work: New perspectives on transfer and boundary-crossing, (pp. 63-81) Amsterdam: Pergamon. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loughran, J.J. (2006). Developing a pedagogy of teacher education: Understanding teaching and learning about teaching. London: Routledge. Miles, M.B., & Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis An expanded sourcebook Second edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Roth, W.-M., & Tobin, K. (2004). Coteaching: from praxis to theory. Teachers and Teachers, 10, 161-179. doi 10.1080/0954025032000188017 Stake, R.E. (2006). Multiple case study analysis. New York: Guilford Press. Van Velzen, C., Volman, M., Brekelmans, M., & White, S. (2012). Guided work-based learning: Sharing practical teaching knowledge with student teachers, Teaching and Teacher Education, 28, 229-239. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2011.09.011 Warford, M.K. (2011). The zone of proximal teacher development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27, 252-258. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2010.08.008 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.