(Re)Framing Classroom Contexts: How New Teachers and Mentors View Diverse Learners and Challenges of Practice

By B. Achinstein, Adele Barrett. Teachers College Record, 2004

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research on new teachers identifies two critical challenges in relation to how novices view their students: “practice shock” that results in an overfocus on controlling students and a cultural mismatch that causes novices to see diversity as a problem. This article explores how mentoring strategies intervene at this critical phase, influencing novices’ beliefs about students and teaching practices. This study examined 15 new teacher-mentor pairs over 2 years in northern California through mentoring conversations, classroom observations, and interviews with mentors and novices working with culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students. Drawing on sociological, organizational, and new teacher educational literature, the study explores how novices and mentors come to “frame” and negotiate student diversity in the classroom. The authors describe three ways of viewing classroom relations that the new teachers and mentors used—managerial, human relations, and political. This article challenges current thinking about novice development by revealing how mentors offer new teachers a repertoire of frames to diagnose challenges and develop alternative approaches to meet the needs of diverse students.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eee767d7b93bc9b1b53f34d4a850898644f01e9c

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Citations in the corpus

Improving the learning of newly qualified teachers in the induction year (2011, background): “The concern for behaviour management from the remaining 14 NQTs often dominated their thinking: they seemed to see all their teaching through a behaviour management lens (Achinstein & Barratt, 2004 ).”
Formal and Informal Mentoring (2014, background): “Organizational characteristics also matter (Achinstein & Barrett, 2004).”
Are We Creating Separate and Unequal Tracks of Teachers? The Effects of State Policy, Local Conditions, and Teacher Characteristics on New Teacher Socialization (2004, unknown): “This study stemmed from a program of research examining the induction experiences of 20 new teachers (see also Achinstein & Barrett, 2004; Achinstein & Villar, in press; Strong & Baron, 2004).”
Teacher Mentoring in Service of Preservice Teachers’ Learning to Teach: Conceptual Bases, Characteristics, and Challenges for Teacher Education Reform (2021, background): “Another challenge is how to support mentor teachers to think and perform adaptively and move flexibly across different mentoring contexts in mentoring preservice teachers (Achinstein & Athanases, 2005; Achinstein & Barrett, 2004).”
Cultural Match or Culturally Suspect: How New Teachers of Color Negotiate Sociocultural Challenges in the Classroom (2008, background): “Counter to the dominant control-oriented or management frames concerned with issues of authority that novices often bring to classroom challenges (Achinstein & Barrett, 2004), the novices of color in our study had a more complex understanding of the students’ comments.”
Mapping mentor teachers' roles in mentoring dialogues (2008, unknown): “Such a personnel is referred to as: “support teacher” (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Feiman-Nemser et al., 1992), “teacher tutor or professional tutor” (Turner, 1993), “associate-tutor” (Collison & Edwards, 1994) or “mentor” (Achinstein & Barrett, 2004; Orland, 2001; Wang et al., 2004).”
Rethinking the practicum: limitations and possibilities (2011, background): “There is an extensive literature (eg, Achinstein & Barrett, 2004 ; Stokking, Leenders, de Jong, & van Tartwijk, 2003 ) that documents the challenges that confront beginning teachers, and draws attention to the ‘transition shock’ (Corcoran, 1981 ) that novices experience when moving from pre-servi”