Facilitating the professional learning of new teachers through critical reflection on practice during mentoring meetings

The focus of this paper is the analysis of data from case studies of mentor meetings derived from an action research project on ‘The professional development of subject induction tutors’. Developing practice as a reflective teacher involves both reflection and action and a reflective teacher compares a teaching and learning situation with his or her own experiences and knowledge of educational theory that predict what might happen. This experiential learning cycle underpins a set of reflective practice strategies which were developed by the project team. These were offered as part of a set of interventions to the target induction tutors who were mentoring new teachers for their induction year in secondary schools in England. Analyses of transcripts of a series of recorded formal review meetings are presented and considered in terms of the evidence of changes in mentoring practice and in the practice of the new teachers to become more self‐evaluative and critically reflective. The implications of the obser...