ABSTRACT
With Chapters 15 and 16 we are back once more with initial teacher education, and specifically with the role, and the training, of schoolteacher mentors. In the present chapter Terry Atkinson explores the three-way interaction between mentors’ and student teachers’ beliefs about each other, the nature of the training, and the learning of school students. He particularly focuses on the implicit theories of the mentors, and examines the ways in which these lead mentors to interact with student teachers in very different ways. One of the most important contrasts to emerge is between mentors who see new teachers’ potential as relatively fixed, and those who see learning to teach very much as a developmental process. What seems to be fundamental in determining the mentors’ attitudes towards student teachers, concludes Atkinson, is their sensitivity towards their own belief systems. Mentors who see their own professional lives in developmental terms are more likely to take a developmental attitude towards their student teachers.
