ON-LINE MENTORING: A BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE IN TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENTPaper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Geneva, 13-15 September 2006

AUTHORS:REALI, ALINE MARIA DE MEDEIROS RODRIGUES (FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SÃO

CARLOS)TANCREDI, REGINA MARIA SIMÕES PUCCINELLI (FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SÃO

CARLOS)

MIZUKAMI, MARIA DA GRAÇA NICOLETTI (Presbyterian University Mackenzie)

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the results of an investigation carried out by

the researchers from a Brazilian public institution (Federal University of São Carlos) and experienced teachers using a research and intervention methodology adopted in an on-line continued teacher education program whose background was the development of mentoring activities to help novice teachers to lighten their everyday professional difficulties. The development of the On-line Mentoring Program has been a rather challenging process, but enriching as well. It has promoted the establishment of professional and affective bonds among the participants, the broadening of professional knowledge, the mastery of on-line adult education technologies and the participants’ professional growth. It should be remarked that it has been a much more complex enterprise than a face-to-face equivalent program would have been because it demands entirely new logistics and some challenges.

INTRODUCTION

Despite much investment in basic education in the past years, it is clear that the quality of education imparted to Brazilian children—even in developed urban centers—has been rather dismal, as indicated by numerous educational surveys. These surveys show that while indicators of student access and retention have dramatically improved in the past decades, in practice passing compares with failing failure

“[…] because students are lethargic; because they cannot think for themselves; because they cannot speak their own minds; because they just take notes and repeat other people’s thoughts. […] [Those

who] succeed at school [...] are deemed as ‘good students’ only because they are able to parrot what their teacher says and does” (Dani & Isaía, 1997, p.1).

Not to mention the students who finish elementary school without having fully mastered their mother tongue and other fundamental contents, as shown by evaluations carried out by Brazilian state and federal agencies.

It is well known that school underachievement is a complex multiple-faceted phenomenon, and thus cannot be attributed to a single cause. However, it appears that teacher education plays an significant part in it. Despite the fact that there is no consensus with respect to how and how much teacher education influences student performance, this work presupposes that there is a strong relation between professional education and proficiency.

Bearing in mind that “learning to teach” and “being a teacher” are on-going and life-long processes, it is important to remark that teaching proficiency does not just derive from pre-service education. On the contrary, the literature indicates that proficient teaching is associated with the capacity to understand the other, students, curricular content, pedagogy, curriculum development, and strategies and techniques related to facilitating students’ learning.

Being a teacher does not encompass characteristics inherent to teaching alone, it goes beyond them: it involves participating in the school, the locus of the professional community par excellence (Knowles, Cole & Presswood, 1994). Hence, taking into consideration the characteristics of teaching and being a teacher as well as those of today’s world, it is vital that teachers be supported to be able to evolve professionally during their careers.

The literature on teacher education also points to the existence of different phases in teachers’ career. These phases display unique characteristics and problems; future, novice and experienced teachers show distinct professional competencies and different educational necessities. Notwithstanding, continued education programs have traditionally taken teacher education—even when held at the workplace—as an undifferentiated whole, thus failing to place proper emphasis on the peculiarities of different career phases.

This work investigates teachers’ educational specificities at different career phases by means of a program to help novice teachers to lighten their everyday professional difficulties. This on-line support is given to novices by experienced teachers (mentors) asynchronously. It assumes that teacher education and on-line education can promote changes in elementary education, and consequently help to alter the present picture of student underachievement in Brazil.

THE FIRST YEARS OF TEACHING, HOW THEY RELATE TO PRE-SERVICE EDUCATION, AND MENTORSHIP AS A TOOL FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE

Every year a great number of novice teachers enter the job market and face the challenge of having to educate a multiplicity of students in a society increasingly focused on knowledge and technology. According to Day (1999), irrespective of the spaces where teaching and learning processes take place, good teachers—i.e., those concerned about teaching and their students’ learning, committed to their professional development, and capable of providing their students with proper frameworks—will always be in great demand. In addition, today’s teachers are not only required to impart knowledge so that their students may perform well at exams, but also to teach them to solve problems and integrate knowledge and understanding into situations where the difference between students and teachers is feeble.

According to Darling-Hammond (1997), it is necessary that teachers learn from their students, by studying, doing and reflecting in collaboration with colleagues, and by carefully observing their students and their work and sharing what they learn.The literature point out that teachers as well as students actively construct their modes of knowing, and these modes operate as maps of their worlds (Day, 1999).

In view of these demands it is important to reexamine the role of initial education and its aspects that concern teachers’ professional development and learning. It seems that today’s pre-service teacher education can only offer a weak antidote to the overwhelming—and often defective—socialization process that teachers experience as students (Ball & Cohen, 1999). Many times these experiences differ from what the literature indicates as desirable and adequate to today’s school scenarios.

Thus, it is essential that teacher education should help these professionals to transcend what they experienced as elementary and secondary students as well as in teacher education.

In Brazil, formal teaching systems—including secondary and teacher education courses—usually include teaching-learning situations that are quite distinct from those found in ordinary classrooms. Teacher students’ first insertions in schools are usually episodic and de-contextualized. Practicums and training experiences are generally involve artificial teaching and professional situations. After a long period of planning and preparation teacher students do their “teaching” in artificial situations in which students are sometimes told how to behave, which only evidences the technical rationality basis of most teacher education programs in Brazil.

It is a fact that skills, competencies and knowledges essential for effective teaching cannot be fully developed during basic or teacher education programs. In most teacher education programs, pedagogical content courses and practicums are often preceded by, and thus segregated from, specific content courses. This lack of integration between theoretical and practical-pedagogic content courses compromises the connection between theory and practice.

Furthermore, teacher students’ insertion in practical classroom and practicum situations is delayed by the programs, and there is too little time is allocated to it. This is detrimental to teacher education because classrooms supply teachers with highly relevant learning opportunities. Indeed, classrooms should be perceived as central learning environments, in which students continuously receive information, respond to teachers’ requests, and actively participate in constructing their knowledge in highly dynamic contexts.

Due to the aforementioned instructional shortcomings in initial teacher education and the fact that there are no educational policies towards effective teaching induction, this work assumes that continued teacher education should be emphasized. This work also presupposes that teacher education should encourage teachers, individually and collectively, to reflect upon their conceptions, beliefs, ideas and practices, and be in responsible for their own professional development in environments that promote self-directed learning and sharing of

knowledge. In addition, this work advances the opinion that continued teacher education programs should provide teachers with time, space and support from experienced professionals—those who have already gone through the initial phases of teaching, and have overcome obstacles towards proficiency.

The deficiencies found in different basic and continued teacher education initiatives reinforce the need for support to teachers, especially novices. The importance of this support becomes more apparent when one considers that teachers act in a complex, uncertain and changing world, whose problems cannot solved by mere application of available theoretical-technical knowledge, as spoused by adepts of the technical rationality model. Taking effective action in these circumstances demands constant decision making and construction of solutions, which, in turn, involve prioritizing, organizing and evaluating often contradictory issues, and proposing reasonable actions (Schön, 1987).

The first years of teaching are marked by processes of survival, discovery, adaptation and learning. It is a period of conflict and intensive learning in unknown contexts (Marcelo Garcia, 1999), when teachers stop being students to become professionals with specific competencies and knowledge. Novice teachers may be characterized as optimistic, positive and hopeful, though they sometimes entertain romantic representations of their role.

Novice teachers face a multiplicity of challenges and demands, which impact the development of their practices and their convictions about their role. The necessary transition from student life to being a teacher entails a period of professional and personal doubts and tensions known as “reality shock”, “transition shock” or “cultural shock” (Tardif & Raymond, 2000). This period varies in duration: 1-3 years (Huberman, 1995) or 1-4 years (Gonçalves, 1995).

Novice teachers face paradoxical situations because as professionals they are expected to display skills and knowledges that have not been fully developed. During the first years they have to perform numerous tasks, such as socializing in the school system, building up the teacher role, and constructing their professional identity, which involve bi-directional processes.

Moreover, novice teachers’ work appears to be influenced by multiple variables. These variables are related to their personal and schooling histories, classes taught (students, contents, teacher-student relationships etc.), schools (peers, administration, curriculum etc), and broader social context (educational policies, economic and social environment etc.). In order to survive in this complex setting, they often conceive routes that are not necessarily conducive to good teaching and/or permanence in the career.

On top, there is evidence in Brazil that the first years of teaching constitute a particularly complex period, because novice teachers are usually assigned the most difficult classes in the most troublesome schools. Notwithstanding these complications, novices are hardly ever provided with institutional support. When this support is ever given it is more likely to come from caring colleagues.

In fact, novice teachers’ routines indicate that this period poses problems that schools are not expected to deal with or follow closely. Schools are not supposed to supply novice teachers with the kind of systematic support that will enable them to cope with this period more easily. Nor are educational systems, teachers’ professional unions or teacher education programs; these agencies do not usually foster policies that may smooth the “passage” from student teacher to practicing teacher. Furthermore, there is a great shortage—at all levels and in all educational systems—of public policies that take into account the characteristics of the first years of teaching.

Although novice teachers have been the object of numerous international research projects, this theme is still rather scarce in Brazil. There have also been few investigations on how to minimize difficulties inherent to this phase through support programs involving more experienced teachers (mentors). As a matter of fact, the authors could not find any studies about experienced teachers assisting other teachers in their teaching.

It is possible to find several initiatives to support novice teachers in the literature such as mentorship or induction programs. These programs attempt to help novice teachers to analyze their professional knowledge base and seek adequate means to broaden it so as to promote their students’ learning. Assisting novice teachers via mentorship programs has

been investigated and adopted in many countries, e.g., the USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand, England (Pacheco & Flores, 1999), Spain (Marcelo Garcia, 1999) and Canada (Knowles, Cole & Presswood, 1994). These countries also foster public policies that facilitate novices’ induction into teaching. Brazil has no such policies, in spite of international research indicating that novice teachers who have been through mentorship programs—with orientated practical learning instead of learning by trial and error—become more effective and committed teachers.

Although mentoring may apply to all phases of the teaching career, it is possible to define a mentorship or induction program as a set of formative activities—following pre-service education—that aim at assisting teachers throughout their first professional years (induction period). According to Marcelo Garcia (1999), a mentorship program is based on three components: a teaching and formative concept; a set of knowledges deemed as important to novice teachers; and a concept of teacher learning and how it may be accomplished. Additional components may be: classroom situations and dilemmas likely to be encountered by novice teachers; tasks and goals of mentorship; professional profile; mentors’ role; and professional education as well as limitations.

In some programs there are constant meetings between mentors and novice teachers, whereas in others these situations are more infrequent. At any rate, it is not the frequency of meetings what counts, but the quality of the interactions. Induction programs may vary as regards conception, organization and functioning. They may be based on “effective teaching”, implying direct instruction about skills and specific contents to novice teachers by more experienced teachers. They may also be based on more complex teaching experiences, perhaps leading to the reorganization of school environments to promote in-depth changes in teachers’ knowledge base. In these cases a constructivist model that emphasizes reflective and collaborative practice is recommended because this model is said to improve novice teachers’ teaching repertoires (Wang & Odell, 2002).

It should be remarked that many of these experiences presuppose a unidirectional concept of mentoring: experienced teachers teaching novices. This work advocates, on the other hand, the perspective of reciprocal development, in which professionals at different levels of

experience help to as well as learn from the organization of a learning community.

The first perspective implicitly establishes differences and distances between mentors and teachers, whereas the second one enhances connections between professionals in different career phases. In a collaborative environment, experienced and novice teachers—working together and sharing ideas about real problems—put their common knowledge base into action and experience relations between theory and practice together (Weiss & Weiss, 1999), i.e., novice teachers and mentors contribute to each other’s professional development.

Selecting mentors is central to the successful development and implementation of mentorship programs. Mentors should be expert teachers, experienced in daily classroom situations and school matters; those who are capable of helping novices to learn the school philosophy and cultural values as well as of demonstrating a repertoire of professional behaviors expected by the school community. They can counsel and orientate novice teachers, provide general information, look for/suggest teaching materials, supervise practices, propose solutions to problems, and share experiences by establishing and maintaining significant interactions. However, despite the fact that good mentorship programs depend heavily on their mentors’ qualifications, there is scarce literature on how to prepare them, i.e., little is known about the education of teacher educators.

On the other hand, notwithstanding indications that novice teachers should be motivated to examine their beliefs about teaching and learning to teach, to construct teaching practices consistent with research findings, and to develop the disposition to learn how to teach, this work assumes that mentoring goes beyond helping novices to learn how to teach. It presupposes that mentoring is also an excellent opportunity for mentors to grow professionally. In this direction, only on should mentors be prepared to develop interpersonal and reflection skills in their interactions with novices, but also to acquire skills and the disposition to teach theoretical notions and concepts of other natures.

In this perspective, reflective practice, be it individual or collective, is of great significance, i.e., “processes of teaching knowledge production from practical situations” should be valued and seen as “the starting and

finishing point” (Pimenta, 2002, p.22) to the teaching of curricular contents, considering the possibilities and limitations that school, social, economic, historic and political contexts impose both on pedagogical actions and on reflecting on them.

DISTANCE EDUCATION: THE INTERNET AS A TOOL FOR NOVICE TEACHERS’ EDUCATION

Distance education (DE) may be a valid response to the increasing demand for quality continued professional education, but it is always not less expensive or more effective than face-to-face education, as it is sometimes postulated. Moreover, the choice between face-to-face and on-line modes of instruction is neither simple nor exclusive; some programs may have to adopt a hybrid model. In any case, distance education has the advantage of being capable of reaching many more students than face-to-face instruction can. Besides, DE can also complement face-to-face education, broaden the knowledge spectrum, and reach people who may not be able to attend school.

Distance education has many definitions. For instance, Marcelo (2002) defines it as a collection of methods particularly suitable to adult education, in which personal experience with respect to a given content may play a relevant role in collective learning. DE is an educational process in which two elements are fundamental: time and space, i.e., teachers and students—or students and students—are separated by time and space in DE (Ramal, 2003).

Distance education has become more and more popular in higher in education, as a consequence of information technology (IT) advances in the last decades. Specifically, the Internet may be seen as a powerful source of information (documents, texts, papers, articles, news etc.), and has a huge potential to reach multiple and diversified clienteles. What is more, the Internet enables people from different cultures and walks of life to engage in virtual distance interactions and create learning communities. It allows people to belong to same interest groups, construct relational networks, get involved in communication communities, and by so doing, construct/reconstruct their own identity.

Distance education originated in the USA and Europe in the second half of the 19th century to meet the growing demand for more specific

professional knowledge, and to reach people who lived far from urban centers, who could not attend school at the ideal age, and who had failed or dropped out of school. This instructional mode, however, has faced strong opposition since its origin—it has been often labeled as “second class” education. Only after the 1960’s—with the establishment of competitive DE universities, which were seen at that time as inferior and destined to marginalized people—was it possible to overcome prejudices against DE universities (Litwin, 2001).

The progress in IT and the increasing public accessibility of PCs and the Internet boosted the process of knowledge acquisition through DE. Indeed, not only did the development of information and communication technologies affect education, but it also changed the way people work, learn, live and apprehend the world around them.

The importance of the Internet in today’s world is patent. It allows fast access to available information in a globalized world, and facilitates individualized learning, i.e., learning at the learners’ pace/available time and meeting their knowledge needs. Despite the fact that information is not equivalent to knowledge, i.e., acquiring information does not make anyone knowledgeable, the Internet can promote learning because previous acquisition of information is a sine qua non in knowledge construction.

Besides, the literature shows that Web users are not mere consumers of information. They are eminently social beings, i.e., they participate in collectivities and affirm their political, cultural and professional ideas (Pontes, 2000). Also, Web users often seek help to overcome individual and collective obstacles, and the Internet provides them with spaces where they can meet others with similar interests, chat, share opinions, and have long-lasting interactions.

In Brazil, especially in the State of São Paulo, people can access the Internet at several places, e.g., post offices, cyber cafés, some bank branches, and union-related organizations. In spite of the fact that schools are the place for children of all ages and social classes to become acquainted with computers, the Internet and new computational and communicational technologies par excellence, most Brazilian schools, especially public ones, do not take full advantage of computers and IT. Brazilian schools employ computers almost solely to support traditional

educational structures and methodologies (Nova & Alves, 2003). Nonetheless, there are some schools, usually private ones, which have attempted to use computers to teach and help their students do their work. The use of computers and the Internet seems to be growing particularly in Brazilian higher education to inform research, replace books, pose problems to students, and supply theories that may underpin their solutions.

Although DE may be growing in Brazil, Moran (2003) criticizes many on-line programs/courses because they seem to simplify pedagogical processes, show little concern for knowledge construction, provide mass instruction, and focus on profit alone. Indeed, studies show that traditional models of instruction prevail in Brazilian on-line DE (Nova & Alves, 2003; Moran, 2003; Ramal, 2003; Santos, 2003), which may be attested by the concept of education they adopt: instruction as mere transmission of knowledge; a mistaken concept that this work is trying to improve.

METHODOLOGY

The development of a mentorship program—as the one under consideration—implies the adoption of a methodology that promotes the mentors’ decision-making processes and subsequent actions. This methodology should also provide the means for the apprehension, interpretation and description of difficulties indicated by the novice teachers and their professional development processes when constructing viable solutions to problems. Additionally, the methodology should promote the apprehension of educational processes of all participants (novice teachers, mentors and researchers). To this end, a constructive-collaborative approach to research was adopted because it makes it possible to apprehend knowledge and monitor the process.

This research work may be depicted as consisting of a dialog between the researchers and teachers aiming at the construction of new knowledges as well as solutions to real school and classroom problems. It is based on action-research (Clark et al., 1996), which has many definitions and designs, and encompasses the following elements:1. Collaboration;2. Focus on problems of practice;

3. Emphasis on professional development;4. Mutual understanding and consensus, democratic decision-making and

common action.On the other hand, there seems to be no consensus about the

definition of collaborative research, either. Apart from that, most collaborative research designs do have some features in common: Shared comprehension, participation of every participant in all research

phases, and collective responsibility in mapping, understanding and solving problems identified by the participants;

Involvement of all participants in the definition of research questions and methodology, and in writing reports;

Consideration for every participant’s educational and professional peculiarities;

Joint work through the exchange of ideas and mutual support.Collaborative research is highly recommended to study educational

settings because by taking part in collaborative processes teachers may critically examine the school context and their classrooms, develop, implement and evaluate interventions, and thus construct new knowledge and evolving professionally. Collaborative research designs are based on a constructive-collaborative framework, whose main concepts may be systematized as follows (Mizukami et al., 2002): “Learning to teach” and “becoming a teacher” are processes, based on

diverse experiences and modes of knowing, that begin before formal education, occur throughout it and permeate all lived professional practices. They involve affective, cognitive, ethical and performance factors, among others (Cole & Knowles, 1993).

“Learning to teach” is a developmental process: it demands time, resources and effort from teachers and educators. The changes that teachers should make to meet social needs and public policies go beyond the acquisition of new teaching techniques. They have to revise conceptually their instructional and educational processes, i.e., they have to reexamine the theoretical concepts that underpin their practices.

Teaching is, ideally, a dynamic and interactive process; it is responsive to classroom events. It occurs in and is a function of institutional contexts. Teachers constantly monitor classroom events and act in

accordance with their perceptions and interpretations of what happens in their classrooms (Schoenfeld, 1997).

The teaching knowledge base consists of a set of different types of understandings, knowledges, skills and dispositions required for effective practice in specific teaching and learning situations. This base informs teachers’ decision-making processes (Shulman, 1986; 1987).

It is possible to find a large number of categories regarding the content and nature of teachers’ professional knowledges, e.g., personal practical knowledge, knowledge of profession, knowledge of cases, knowledge of educational principles and metaphors. Every one of these knowledges is important to teacher professional development (Schoenfeld, 1997).

Eliciting teachers’ knowledges, beliefs, goals and hypotheses is vital to understand what they do in their classrooms and why they do so. In addition, teachers’ practices can also be influenced by their conceptions about learning, the course/curricular contents they teach, and their students.

Continued education programs should be adapted to specific school contexts. Correspondingly, the program structure and contents should be determined by the teachers themselves. Besides, continued teacher education programs should take into account the fact that adult education relates more to practice than to theory (Darling_Hammond, 1994; Marcelo Garcia, 1998; Calderhead, 1996; Schoenfeld, 1997).

Reflection on pedagogical practice is a powerful strategy in continued teacher education, which should occur at the workplace by preference.

Teachers need mental time and space, which should be institutionalized by public policies, to evolve professionally (McDiarmid, 1995). Schools, as workplaces, are central in promoting professional development of its participants (teachers, administrators, students, families, community). School-based continued teacher education can benefit the school and foster its teaching and learning processes, hence it is important to provide teachers with an environment of support and professional growth at their workplace.

When it is not possible to hold continued education programs at schools, these programs should make an effort to meet the specific educational needs indicated by the participants.

Collaboration, the key feature in the constructive-collaborative model of intervention-research, is conceived of as dialogical, meaning that teachers and researchers should engage themselves in conversation, exchange and reciprocal professional development. Collaboration leads to mutual understanding and consensus, democratic decision-making and joint actions (Clark et al., 1996; 1998). It encourages inquiry, generation of new knowledges and solutions to everyday school problems.

The interpretation of data and contexts should be regarded as a collaborative accomplishment (Wasser & Bresler, 1996), in which multiple viewpoints are in dynamic tension, as when people attempt to make communal sense of themes, problems and work fields.

The option for collaborative work among researchers, mentors and novice teachers implies conceiving and adopting procedures/activities that favor partnership and mutual learning processes (Cole & Knowles, 1993). It entails the systematic investigation of the collaborative work so as to change the social relations existing in the context/community under consideration (Aldenam, 1989). In addition, when studying teachers’ professional development processes, it is relevant that researchers observe, participate and discuss teaching, learning and other educational aspects with the main actors.

In this direction, in the first phase of the project, the researchers devised the Mentorship Program with a group of experienced teachers—deemed by the local community as outstanding professionals. The program was developed from the future mentors’ conceptions of teaching, learning, knowledge, students, teachers, school and curriculum as well as from what they thought they needed to learn to act as mentors. The basic features, presuppositions, “curriculum”, activities and duration of the Mentorship Program were delineated in the same fashion. The program activities—e.g., readings and discussions on articles, case studies, and written and oral accounts of professional experiences—were jointly conceived by the researchers and mentors-to-be at weekly two-hour meetings during three months.

In the second phase of the project—when the mentoring activities began—the researchers monitored the mentors’ work closely through discussions and studies at weekly meetings and by means of their written

accounts of activities carried out with their novice teachers. In addition to monitoring their work, the researchers met with the mentors on a weekly basis to discuss how the Mentorship Program was evolving, and to assist in their professional development.

In methodological terms, this work assumes that apprehending teachers’ reflective processes implies gathering internal and external information concerning the subjects—in this case, the mentors—through activities that will favor the elicitation of their knowledges and beliefs. In this work the mentors’ conceptions are primarily grasped by systematically monitoring their professional development processes and examining the accounts of their work.

The purpose of the researchers’ constant meetings with mentors and specialists at the university is to study and analyze the educational process carried out by the mentors and their partner novice teachers, propose solutions to the problems encountered in mentoring, and contribute knowledge and experiences to individual mentor’s work. As a consequence, the group becomes stronger and committed to reciprocal learning.

Regarding the data collected by observation, one of the challenges faced by the researchers has been how to systematize conversations so that knowledges and processes involved can be identified and understood, especially the knowledges and processes associated with the construction of teachers’ learning communities. In order to meet this challenge, the researchers have relied on Carrol’s (2005) model to analyze dialogs and collective construction of ideas, Little’s (2002) model to analyze modes of practice and participation throughout time, keeping in mind the dilemmas inherent to the internal analysis of teacher communities, and Grossman, Wineburg & Woolworth’s (2001) indicators of professional community building.

With respect to the documents, this work considers the teachers’ (novices and mentors) texts as narratives, i.e., a type of knowledge that enables the characterization, understanding and representation of human experience (Vaz, Mendes & Maués, 2001). We consider the experiences as lived stories and reflection triggers, whereas narratives are considered to be told stories (Clandinin & Conelly, 1994).

The option for e-mails and reflective journals to identify and comprehend the teachers’ personal views was based on the assumption that these artifacts can effectively elicit the knowledges and beliefs that underpin their pedagogical practices. By doing so, this work presupposes that teachers know what they say they know. That is to say that this work assumes that words are the thinking medium par excellence and can isomorphically represent what exists in people’s minds; that people’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings are ‘rooted’ in their words (Freeman, 2000). Therefore, this work considers that the novices’ and mentors’ texts and accounts verily represent their actual experiences.

Consistent with the methodology adopted, the analysis of the data has been done together with the mentors in an on-going fashion: an on-going cycle of reflection on conceived and implemented actions.

The mentors are teachers with more than 15 years of teaching experience. Despite their different majors and professional backgrounds, these 10 teachers have two characteristics in common: they have firmly invested in their professional development throughout their careers and are generally evaluated as good professionals by their peers.

Twenty three novice teachers participate in the On-line Mentorship Program. They are 21-52 years old—the majority being in the 21-30 bracket. They have taught grades 1-4 for 1-5 years; some have taught other grades and levels. Fifteen work at public schools; four at industry-related professional organization schools; two at rural schools; two hold two part-time jobs (at a public school and at a private school); 22 reside in the State of São Paulo (three in São Carlos and the remaining ones in nearby cities) and one in the State of Santa Catarina.

At the time of application six teachers taught 1st grade; eight taught 2nd grade; four taught 3rd grade; and five taught 4th grade. During the first semester one of them switched to teaching English to grade 1-4 students; two were assigned remedial classes; two started teaching at two different schools; and two changed jobs and began teaching multi-graded classes at country schools

SOME RESULTS AND CONSIDERATIONS

The construction of the on-line Mentorship Program—its educational strategies and evaluation process—began in October 2003, and continues today at weekly meetings between the researchers and mentors. In the first year these parties elaborated educational strategies to foster the mentors’ mastery of IT and professional development as regards mentoring activities. The main features and concepts of the On-line Mentorship Program were defined then, and are now the basis for the development of mentoring actions. These concepts, which may be found at the Portal dos Professores website (www.portaldosprofessores.ufscar.br), are revisited whenever there are doubts on how to proceed.

The most significant difficulties faced by the participating novices elicited in the beginning of the Mentorship Program are: interaction with their colleagues and school administration (65%); specific classroom aspects, such as use of didactic material (13%); teaching at rural schools (9%); and precarious teaching facilities (9%). Other difficulties were disclosed as the program progressed, such as troublesome induction into teaching, especially in reference to choosing grades/school and contacting the school. In spite of the fact that most Brazilian schools are required to allocate time and space for collective planning and pedagogical learning, many novice teachers express a strong feeling of isolation together with dilemmas about what and how to teach children with different academic repertoires, how to evaluate their performance, and how to relate to colleagues.

One thing has drawn the researchers’ attention: the novice teachers’ high functional mobility within short periods of time. For instance, in the first semester of 2005 two teachers that used to teach regular classes were relocated to remedial classes, where they were made responsible for almost 120 students with multiple learning deficiencies. This aspect also shows that anxiety, dilemmas and tensions may not be inherent to the period of induction into teaching alone, they may also happen every time teachers face major changes throughout their careers.

The Mentorship Program activities with the novice teachers began in March 2005. E-mailing was the chosen tool of communication between the mentors and their partner novices: almost 1,200 messages were exchanged in the first semester. A longitudinal investigation of this

process indicates the existence of phases relative to the rhythm the e-mail messages were exchanged and the manner they are structured, which, in turn, displays a close relation to the mentoring process development.

The content of the first messages is characterized by the mentors probing, approaching, eliciting the novices’ needs, creating a common language with them, individually and collectively. Some mentor-novice dyads produced up to 83 e-mail exchanges in the first month, and have even made an effort to exchange messages synchronously, i.e., in “chat rooms”. The content of the first messages also shows that some mentors were uneasy about the development of the Program activities.

The mentors displayed patterns of professional behavior similar to those of their partner novice teachers. Their reflective journals and oral accounts at the meetings with the researchers showed that they were going through a process of anxiety, uncertainty and expectation and were experiencing grief, conflict and dilemmas without pre-established solutions, feelings inherent to the induction period. However, unlike most novice professionals, they expressed that they felt they could count on the researchers for support.

From the initial contacts—which varied in duration for each dyad—the mentors moved on to a phase of mapping out the novices’ professional routes and conceptions and understanding the causes of their difficulties. The content of their e-mail messages in this phase shows that they wanted to meet the needs indicated by their partner novice teachers, though sometimes they were the ones to define the focus. On the whole, these e-mail exchanges reveal the complexity and vicissitudes of the first teaching years and the novices’ lack of stability with respect to their work conditions.

The subsequent monitoring work comprised the development of teaching and learning experiences (Mizukami et al., 2002), i.e., structured situations planned by the mentors with their partner novices, and implemented by the latter from themes that they deemed relevant. These situations derived from practical difficulties encountered by the novice teachers, and their development may be depicted as a circumscriptive process involving actions of diverse natures on the part of the mentors and novices. They also involved, depending on the case, the novice teachers’ students.

A preliminary analysis of the data from the initial phase of the On-line Mentorship Program indicates the following:1. Every mentor displays an idiosyncratic and individual pattern of

relationship and communication with their novice teachers. Every mentor performs a personal translation of the objectives, ends, contents and educational strategies of the Mentorship Program, despite having participated in the consensual establishment of its theoretical and methodological basis.

2. All mentor-novice dyads construct unique routes as regards the development of the Program. They display distinctive rhythms and patterns when performing the Program activities. A dyad’s rhythm and patterns also modified during the process.

3. The mentors and novice teachers have adopted a model of interaction characterized by direct instructional assistance associated with direct personal and emotional support, confirming Wang & Odell (2002).

4. The mentors’ processes of professional development and learning are not similar to the novice teachers’ processes. Both the mentors and novice teachers experience individual processes of meaning attribution, in dyads and collectively, deriving from their interactions and actions related to Program.

5. Establishing precise goals and clear interaction strategies—which were translated as teaching and learning experiences—seems to have promoted the professional development and learning processes of the mentors’ and novice teachers’ alike.

6. Written communication is different from face-to-face communication: the absence of tone/impact markers of words—usually provided by gesture or by visually examining students’ work in face-to-face interactions—has raised much anxiety and doubt on the part of the mentors. In order to curb this limitation some mentors have requested that the novices send them their students’ written work or have arranged visits with their partner novices. Written communication, on the other hand, has the advantage of being asynchronous; it presents fewer opportunities for the mentors to act on impulse, consequently higher chances of proper construction of messages/answers. Indeed, the mentors have devoted a lot of time to preparing answers to their novice teachers’ questions.

7. Mentorship seems to be best performed by practicing professionals—i.e., the fact that the mentors in question are in touch with practical classroom situations themselves seems to favor their mentoring performance.

8. Some mentors have carried out the mentoring process around the themes and contents they have more mastery of and/or more experience with.

9. The mentors’ work emphasizes the difficulties faced by the novice teachers concerning the teaching of specific contents (pedagogical content knowledge), which involves teaching content knowledge on a new basis. They expect that the novice teachers will put their recommendations into use, and encourage them to develop reflective processes about their own practices.

10.It appears that no mentor can satisfactorily develop their educational activities without the other mentors’ knowledge and assistance. All of them have habitually requested their peers’ advice to solve problems encountered in the mentoring activities under their responsibility.

11.The mentors have participate in processes of collective reflection and have put their new understandings into practice: interdependence of group members; testing individual understandings and making the passage from the personal level to the public one.

12.Both mentors and novice teachers have revealed systematic, rigorous and disciplined reflective processes in their accounts and journals. These processes imply experiencing situations, interpreting experiences, indicating problems/issues, attempting to explain problems/issues, turning explanations into hypotheses, and experimenting with or testing these hypotheses (Rodgers, 2002).

13.The mentor-researcher, mentor-mentor and mentor-novice dyads have systematically produced interactive conversations via weekly meetings and e-mail messages. On these occasions they often establish relations with the ideas discussed at researchers-mentors meetings or through mentor-mentor and mentor-novice teacher contacts. These relations have also been observed at other times during the mentoring process, e.g., when the mentors implicitly or explicitly count on other mentors to agree with their explanations or offer alternative explanations.

14.Interactive conversation seems to insert an element of inquiry in the group’s discourse. The participants are often invited/induced to go beyond the mere description of a particular circumstance, relate it to other examples, and view it from another standpoint—in light of more comprehensive ideas, principles or assumptions.

15.Paradigm clashes have taken place between some mentor-novice dyads as well as mentor-mentor dyads, which have led some mentors to express feelings of inconformity, discomfort and inadequacy to work with dissimilar beliefs.

16.Little by little, the participants’ frameworks have been delineated; ideas have been examined and sometimes replaced; and a basis for collaborative conversation is being created by them.

17.The group—mentors, specialists and researchers—is gradually bringing forth a learning community, i.e., there is evidence of a movement toward defining the group’s identity, with the establishment of interaction rules. Although personal differences have been honored, there is a tendency to share responsibility for the learning of peers and novices as a group.

18.The mentors and novice teachers have shown attitudes indicative of valorization of individual and collective intellectual growth.

Some challenges (tensions), present in the development and investigation of the Mentorship Program, have to be further understood and better managed. One of the challenges refers to time, a key variable in successful development and implementation of actions. In addition, time to do research and time to support the mentors and novice teachers are not one and the same. This dissimilitude must be taken into account and understood in order to avoid hastily planned and implemented actions and make sure that research activities are not compromised. The process of apprehending and understanding the context, novice’s needs and mentoring takes time and cannot be expedited, since it involves people being physically present. On top, the novice teachers are not granted any institutional time to participate in the Program; consequently they have done so in their free time.

Likewise, the necessary time between the novices posing a problem or dilemma and the mentors’ subsequent work must also be considered. Urgencies cannot always get prompt responses in the Mentorship

Program, since its goals are to promote the participants’ professional learning. Professional learning may be defined as an on-going process of knowledge construction, involving thinking up hypotheses, testing alternatives and evaluating courses of action. These actions can rarely be performed in a short or pre-established period of time.

Another challenge, partially concerns time, is related to the mentors’ capacity to meet the novice teachers’ demands. In the initial phases of the Program the mentors expressed experiencing conflict about how to proceed with respect to these demands, i.e., how to prioritize these demands, which criteria to adopt, which demands should/could get prompt answers or be answered later during the process, etc.

In short, the mentors faced the challenge of balancing the novices’ demands and the Program characteristics. Choosing the adequate procedure implied evaluating the number of demands and their nature, deciding whether they could be articulated, were inter-related or could be dealt with separately; whether they required focal or more comprehensive responses; whether they were under the novice teacher’s control or linked to other institutional/context variables. The mentors refer to this challenge as the dilemma between giving a fish and teaching how to fish.

The third challenge that demands consideration is related to difficulties deriving from working with an open curriculum such as the one in the Mentorship Program. In some moments it has been observed that the mentors were not at ease about working with specific contents that emerged during the mentoring tasks, of which they had no mastery. On these occasions the variety of professional profiles, experiences and routes on the part of the mentors has shown to be one of the group’s assets.

As a result, the mentors’ feeling of being safely anchored in a pre-established curriculum is being slowly replaced by an continuous process of exchange of information, materials and suggestions among them. This process of collaboration has favored the broadening of the mentors’ knowledge base, in particular their specific content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.

It appears that no mentors are capable of meeting all the needs of a novice teacher by themselves, since no teacher knowledge base is comprehensive and diversified enough. In addition, this challenge points

to the importance of working with a group of professionals that are, individually and collectively, committed to seeking and constructing solutions to problems faced by its members.

Another aspect that deserves consideration refers to the promotion of directive learning, which involves permanent adaptation, i.e., it does not allow the reproduction of practices. Various situations presented by the novice teachers had already been experienced by the mentors, not only when they were novices themselves, but also throughout their professional careers. However, although the mentors could refer to their experience on many occasions, the “solutions” to the novices’ problems had to be devised in light of the particularities and variables of the situation under analysis. The mentors have gradually understood, from the work with their partner novice teachers, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the teaching and leaning processes they are in charge of, and put aside the idea that they have always to get it right with their novice partners.

The fourth challenge concerns the mentors’ dilemmas associated with the roles of teacher and researcher. Though they may see themselves as teachers contributing to the novice teachers’ professional development and learning and systematically reflect on their own practices, their active participation in a research group raises their desire to develop a repertoire of professional researcher behaviors, e.g., participation in academic events. Indeed, the mentors have truly acted as co-researchers; engaging in mutual investigation of experiences, their own and other participants’ experiences. The mentors have been observed to carry out more and more research activities, e.g., recording, inquiring, interpreting and representing experiences, as well as accurately informing the researchers about the data collected.

The fifth challenge is related to the development of distance education actions, without face-to-face contact. It has affected the mentors and researchers alike and may be associated with the search for language adequacy, interaction articulation (e-mail messages, documents, and reflective journals), access to the novices’ practices, understanding accounts of events, and evaluating the fidelity and validity of recorded information. The absence of elements that advance the understanding of dialogs in traditional face-to-face formative actions, e.g., intonation, non-

verbal and verbal language, has engendered discussions at researchers-mentors meetings with the latter often questioning their accurate understanding of words and ideas expressed by the novice teachers.

The co-existence of diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives has also been challenging to the mentors and novices. More and more conflicts emerged as the work progressed. There were clear attempts, especially in the first meetings, to deny these differences and mask conflicts on the part of the mentors. Nowadays, divergent opinions are brought forth and discussed, and these differences are properly dealt with and taken advantage of so as to generate new knowledge. This process may be evidenced among the mentors more clearly than between the mentors and novice teachers, probably because the mentors do not regard themselves and the novice teachers as belonging to the same professional learning community, a phenomenon inherent to the initial phase of the creation of a professional learning community according to Grossman, Wineburg & Woolworth (2001).

This leads to the discussion about the nature of the interactions among the mentors, novices and researchers. The mentors’ participation in the activities in the beginning phases of the Mentorship Program was rather uneven, especially regarding their concerns about peers, which suggests that some mentors considered one’s intellectual growth as individual responsibilities, instead of a collective endeavor. This concept is being gradually replaced by the construction of group identity and the tendency to see individual novice teachers’ problems as pertaining to all mentors. This shows that the group is developing the idea that all members are responsible for each other’s growth, an indication of a maturing learning community.

In conclusion, despite being preliminary and partial, these results are very significant and indicate how much there is to learn and investigate in experienced teachers’ and novice teachers’ educational processes. They also indicate the importance of public policies that foster assisted teacher induction, while respecting the characteristics of this professional phase and not demanding from novice teachers the responsibilities usually expected of more experienced teachers.

The development of the On-line Mentorship Program has been rather challenging. It has been much more complex than an equivalent

face-to-face program would have been because it demands entirely new logistics. Notwithstanding, it has been very enriching: it has promoted the broadening of the participants’ knowledge base, their mastery of on-line distance education technologies, their professional development and learning, and the establishment of professional and affective bonds.

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