“She’s learning but we’re both teachers”: Mentorship Stances and the Development of Learning Partnerships in Student Teaching Placements

Abstract

In August of 2021, High Tech High Graduate School of Education welcomed Cohort 4 of the San Diego Teacher Residency (SDTR), a teacher preparation program embedded within the sixteen schools of High Tech High (HTH), a San Diego-based network of project-based charter schools. Over the course of 2021-2022, the educator professional landscape has changed significantly. Teachers are leaving the field in astonishingly high numbers, a statistic amplified for BIPOC teachers. As a nimble program strongly partnered with HTH schools, SDTR is uniquely positioned to respond in ways that could upend normative structures and practices that limit the potential for educator thriving. This capstone documents my work with HTH cooperating teachers (CTs). Research has yet to fully unpack the complex role CTs play in student teacher learning, especially regarding mentorship practices. I attempted to understand CTs’ work, identifying generative patterns, while also impacting their practice, in service of increasing uptake of specific stances linked to student teacher success. I argue that four stances tend to both characterize generative student teaching placements and, when taken up by CTs, increase levels of mutual satisfaction in student teaching placements. These stances - spaciousness, inquiry cycles, student teacher-as-learner, and student teacher-as-expert - are mutually reinforcing and dynamic. I document the attempts to increase uptake of these stances, while also highlighting particularly generative student teacher/CT partnerships as models for future practice and sites for further inquiry.