learning through interactive talk: a school-based mentor teacher study group as a context for...

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Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457–473

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Learning through interactive talk: A school-based mentorteacher study group as a context for professional learning

David Carroll�

Western Washington University, 264-D Miller Hall, 516 High St., Bellingham, WA 98225-9090, USA

Abstract

This article reports on a year-long study of collaborative professional learning in a mentor teacher study group

connected to a large university teacher education program. It introduces a theoretical framework for considering the

nature of interactive talk and its relationship to professional learning. Using examples of study group discourse, it then

presents a methodology for analyzing interactive talk and the joint construction of ideas about practice. The article

concludes by describing study group materials and analytic tasks developed from artifacts of practice, and offering an

analysis of leadership and facilitation issues for guiding inquiry-oriented discourse in study group contexts.

r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Mentoring; Teacher study groups; Communities of practice

1. Introduction

During the 1998–99 school year, a group of fiveteachers from an urban mid-western elementaryschool met together regularly with the universityinstructor supervising their teacher interns toinvestigate their collective experiences with men-toring. Calling themselves the Collaborating Tea-cher Study Group (CTSG), they examined recordsand artifacts of their mentoring experience to-gether and attempted to develop both theirunderstanding of learning to teach and theirrepertoire of practice for mentoring novice tea-

e front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserv

te.2005.03.005

650 2251.

ss: [email protected].

chers. In this article, I present an account of thegroup from my perspective as the universityinstructor. I describe research I conducted as bothparticipant/observer and group leader, and outlinea theoretical framework I developed for examininginteractive talk and its relationship to professionallearning in teacher study groups. Using examplesfrom study group discourse, I illustrate the use ofanalytic tools I developed to study interactive talkand the joint construction of ideas about mentor-ing practice, and to examine my leadership‘‘moves’’ in guiding study group talk.

Teacher education programs have been encour-aged in recent years to devote more attention todeveloping partnerships with schools and to help-ing teachers become better equipped to mentor

ed.

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1The name, ‘‘Capitol’’, is a pseudonym.

D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457–473458

pre-service teacher candidates (National Commis-sion on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996).Teacher study groups have been recognizedincreasingly as one form of professional develop-ment potentially capable of engaging teachers inthe inquiry and critical analysis necessary for thiskind of practice-centered professional learning(Ball & Cohen, 1999; Wilson & Berne, 1999).

However, study groups are not well understoodas contexts for teacher learning (Ball, 1996; Wilson& Berne, 1999). This is in part due to the inherentcomplexity of language and its relationship tothought.

What exactly are the functions of language inthe classroom or in any situation where weclaim that learning is (or should be) takingplace? Linguists still struggle in their thicklytextured studies of language use to solve theriddle of the relation between observed lan-guage behaviors that ‘‘come out of the mouth’’and mental processes that go on ‘‘in thehead’’(Zentella, 1997, quoted in (Heath, 2000).

Attempting to make sense of the relationshipbetween talk and thinking presents significantchallenges which researchers are just beginning toexplore (Wilson & Berne, 1999). There is also littleguidance available for those who would lead suchstudy groups, and the inherent tension betweendeveloping and sustaining inquiry into practice,while simultaneously promoting professional de-velopment around mentoring practice is challen-ging to negotiate as a group leader.

The analytic tools and the examination of studygroup leadership issues presented here are poten-tially useful in other settings where teachereducators and researchers are attempting to findways of understanding how to work with teachersto develop their mentoring practice. Although thework is exploratory in nature and situated in myown practice as a teacher educator, it suggestspromising openings for further research andexplorations of practice.

The article begins with a description of thecontext for the mentor development project andstudy in an urban elementary school associatedwith a large mid-western teacher education pro-gram. The study group is introduced and ideas

about its operation, leadership, and activities overthe course of the year of the study are presentedbriefly. The remainder of the paper is in three partswhich use examples from the study group toexplore the relationship between interactive talkand professional learning. In Part One, I introducea theoretical framework for examining the natureof interactive talk and its relationship to profes-sional learning which I developed inductively inthe course of this work. I use concepts from thatframework to analyze an extended example ofinteractive talk from our study group session inMarch, after we had been meeting for severalmonths and the interactive character of talk in thegroup had developed considerably. I then presenta taxonomy of interactive speech forms usedrecurrently in the study group which had theeffect of introducing an inquiry orientation to thediscourse.

In Part Two, I draw again on the analytic toolsintroduced in Part One. I use them to illustratehow I investigated the joint construction andcollective warranting of ideas in the study groupas it evolved into a genuine community of practicethat promoted participants’ professional learning.In Part Three, I address issues of leadership forinquiry-oriented professional discourse. I analyzethe kinds of materials and analytic tasks weexplored. I consider the range of my ownparticipation in the group in facilitating inquiry.I then present three recurrent circumstances instudy group talk which illustrate different aspectsof my participation. To conclude, I summarizeimportant dilemmas and challenges of leadershipfor this kind of collective study group inquiry.

2. Study context

Capitol1 Elementary School, where this studytakes place, is a diverse urban school with nearly300 students in grades K-5. The time period of thisstudy was the 1998–99 school year, the second yearof Capitol’s participation in the teacher educationprogram associated with a large mid-westernuniversity. The cluster placement plan featured in

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Table 1

CTSG participants

Teacher Grade level Intern

Susan Kindergarten Ben

Pam First grade Karen

Martha First grade Tammy

Sandy Second grade Megan

Anne Fifth grade Brenda

3As a teacher in Philadelphia, I was a member of the

Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative (Himley & Carini

2000).4Ball and Cohen (1999) have since presented an insightful

D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457–473 459

the teacher education program enabled fiveteacher interns to be placed at Capitol during theyear of the study. I was assigned for 8 h per weekas the university program liaison responsible forinterns’ supervision at the school.

The CTSG was composed on a voluntary basisof the five teachers who chose to work with teacherinterns at Capitol during that year, plus theprincipal, John.2 John attended sporadically ashis other duties allowed, although he was anenthusiastic supporter of the activity. The studygroup met for nine 2–3 h sessions from Septemberto April. Each session was audio taped and,beginning in November, video taped as well. Table1 introduces the study group participants and theirinterns.

I had worked with interns at Capitol theprevious year, attended numerous faculty meet-ings, participated in staff retreats, and generallylearned much about the school’s recent history andthe complex social relations which characterizeany small and intense work setting, such as anelementary school. I was a regular visitor in theclassrooms of study group members as I carriedout my responsibilities related to observing andconferring with their interns. Thus, my participantstatus in both the study group and the widerschool culture privileged my vantage point andprovided important contextual understanding forinterpreting our joint work.

My role in the group, as both colleague andgroup leader, was complex and uncertain. Every-one recognized from the way in which the groupwas founded at my invitation that we met for thepurpose of promoting professional learning andthat I was the leader, or in essence, the teacher for

2All personal names are pseudonyms.

that effort. As with other teaching situations, thatput me in a dominant power relationship withother participants (Tom, 1984).

Despite my role as group leader, I was alsoparticularly interested in fostering what Lord(1994) has called ‘‘critical colleagueship’’ amongstudy group participants, including myself. Couldfellow professional educators come together withdifferent experiences, background ideas, roleorientations, and commitments, yet genuinelycollaborate around an agenda of joint work andagree to grapple with each others’ points of view—not necessarily expecting to change viewpoints,but willing to take on the challenge? I wanted tofoster the development of a caring and self-criticalprofessional community. In my mind, I wasstriving for what Bruner (1990) has referred to as‘‘critical open-mindedness’’. Such open-minded-ness is at the heart of professional learning. Greene(1978) refers to this in her emphasis on fostering‘‘wide-awakeness’’.

If teachers are not critically conscious, if theyare not awake to their own values and commit-ments (and to the conditions working uponthem), if they are not personally engaged withtheir subject matter and with the world around,I do not see how they can initiate the young intocritical questioning or the moral life.

As group leader I exercised the primaryinfluence on what we talked about and how weorganized our talk, although on several occasions Idid defer my plans in lieu of emergent interests inthe group. I also based my plans largely on issueswhich arose in the mentoring work of groupparticipants. From previous experience in studygroups,3 I had a strong preference for focusing ourtalk on artifacts of mentoring practice,4 e.g.,observation texts, videos of teaching or de-briefingconversations, lesson plans.

I began our first session by using a writtenobservation I had created of one teacher’s lesson

analysis of the potential of using artifacts in this way as part of

a pedagogy for professional learning ‘‘in and from practice’’.

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which we studied, asking ourselves, ‘‘What wouldbe important for a novice to notice about thisteaching?’’5 We went on to examine a videotapeof a co-planning session in which a mentorteacher and I worked with her intern to plan alesson. Next I created a series of tapes with thissame teacher–intern pair showing planning, teach-ing, and de-briefing after teaching. In each case inthe study group we examined the tapes, often usinga transcript and related lesson plans as well, andworked together to make sense of what washappening and what ‘‘mentoring moves’’ weobserved on the part of the mentor or myself.Following that series, I taped another series inwhich a different mentor carried out the samepattern of planning, observing teaching, and de-briefing.

In the course of analyzing this latter series, studygroup members generated a more formal set ofideas to guide our work with interns for thecoming year. We later called this the Curriculumfor Learning to Teach at Capitol. The experienceof developing the Curriculum, and the teachers’enthusiasm for using it to guide their subsequentmentoring practice, was a crowning achievementfor our work as a study group that year. Thepractices which participants both came to under-stand and committed themselves to initiating withinterns in the ensuing year represented a significantdeparture from their previous mentoring practice.6

They anticipated taking numerous concrete stepstoward making their teaching practice moreaccessible to their interns and playing a moreactive role as teacher educators.

Each teacher committed to modeling detailedlesson and unit planning and to talking thatprocess through early in the coming year for theirinterns. In my mind, and in the minds of otherCTSG participants, the Curriculum representedthe learning we had experienced and the newunderstandings we had generated. I was also

5A more detailed description of these materials is presented in

Part Three.6Space limitations preclude providing further evidence for

this claim here, but the original study presented an analysis of

the changes in mentoring practice by one mentor and examined

the connection between study group discourse and elements in

the Curriculum.

struck by the way in which the ideas reflected inthe Curriculum seemed to be collectively generatedand endorsed.

I asked teachers about the impact of generatingthe Curriculum in individual interviews at the endof the school year. As Susan put it, ‘‘I’m reallypleased with the draft (Curriculum). It consoli-dated what we’ve been struggling with and gives usa foundation and a basis for our work next year.’’Pam emphasized the usefulness of our ideas aboutgetting the year started: ‘‘All those beginningthingsytalking out loud, having conversations(about the teaching) in front of the kidsygettingthe kids used to that.’’ She felt work on thecurriculum put her ‘‘in better shape to acknowl-edge right away that this (her intern) is a personlearning to teach’’. Sandy suggested going over thecurriculum chart the following September withnew interns and collaborating teachers (CTs). Inspeaking of her shifting feelings about ourwork, she said, ‘‘I felt at first that there wassomething wrong with me. (Later) I learned—thewhole group learned. It finally sunk in.’’Anne spoke of how the Curriculum set up‘‘a calendar of mentoring work across the year.Last year I didn’t have that clear an idea and wassort of sliding into things’’ (Final CT Interviews,May 1999).

At the time, I assumed that the new under-standings we achieved had been significantlyinfluenced by the discourse in our study group,since that was the context in which the Curriculumwas invented. The challenge for me was to analyzehow study group talk promoted teacher learningand led to new ideas and commitments aboutmentoring practice.

3. Part One: developing a theoretical framework

and analytic tools from examining study group

transcripts

As a study of learning in a teacher study groupwhich I created and led, this research falls at theintersection of ethnographic inquiry featuring aparticipant–observer, and a professional develop-ment intervention situated in the context of myown practice. I am thus a study group participant,

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a researcher, and a professional developmentleader simultaneously. As a participant–observerin the study group, and as a participant in otherschool activities and functions, as opposed to anoutside researcher, I was privy to many layers ofmeaning in our talk which would otherwise havebeen more obscure. Research data also includedinterviews with study group participants near thebeginning and at the end of our work together, aswell as numerous email messages and notesgenerated between myself and study group parti-cipants in the course of our joint mentoring workwith our interns. That material helped me tointerrogate my own perceptions regarding studygroup events and to interpret the meaning ofinteractions.

Taking part in the kind of conversation whichemerged over time in the CTSG offered partici-pants an opportunity to join into a process ofthinking with colleagues. Examining the record ofsuch conversations offers the analyst a vantagepoint for studying participants’ thinking to makevisible how it was influenced by the conversationalinteraction. In the original study, upon which thisarticle is based, I conducted a systematic examina-tion of study group tapes guided by Erickson(1982), who advises ‘‘repeatedly re-visiting audio-visual records to attempt to identify their fullcomplexity and to recognize the range andvariation among events in the setting and establishhow typical and/or untypical particular types ofevents are’’. The theoretical framework I devel-oped inductively from analyzing study group talklinks Wenger’s (1998) ideas about learning in‘‘communities of practice’’ with linguistic ap-proaches to studying conversation and discussiondeveloped by Goodwin (1990), O’Connor andMichaels (1993, 1996), and Edelsky (1993).

According to Wenger, communities of practiceoccur spontaneously when people carry on theirlives and participate with others in making sense oftheir experience. He sees this as a human predis-position and a corner stone of his socio-culturallearning theory. In communities of practice wherepeople are engaged in ongoing learning and notsimply stuck in their ways, individuals negotiatemeaning through a combination of participating injoint experience (‘‘practice’’) and representing

(‘‘reifying’’) the sense they are making to others(Wenger, 1998). They may do this through acombination of action and talk that they share—whether cooking or gardening, or auto mechanicsor whatever, depending upon the nature of thepractice. Study group participants formed acommunity of practice in which they were engagedin joint experience that entailed both directengagement in mentoring and talk about suchpractices in study group sessions. Interactive talkwas the means for negotiating and representingmeaning in study group sessions. Creating theCurriculum involved negotiating and representingmeaning.

To better understand what was happening in theprocess of ‘‘negotiating meaning’’ and representingit to others through interactive talk in the CTSG, Iturned to ideas from conversation analysis. Good-win (1990) used the construct of ‘‘participantframeworks’’ to investigate how children playingon the streets used talk to align each other inrelation to claims about previous actions orstatements. These informal conversations ofteninvolved a combination of teasing and assertingstatus (‘‘he said she saidy’’) whereby childrenpositioned themselves and others in relationshipsand reported actions. O’Connor and Michaels(1993, 1996) used this construct to apply to themore formal conversation format of a classroomdiscussion in which teachers were aligning stu-dents’ comments in relation to curriculum con-cepts (e.g., ‘‘John said ___; what do you think?’’).They used the term ‘‘re-voicing strategies’’ whichemphasizes the pedagogical use of the concept intheir context. In my data analysis, I noticed thatCTSG participants also used talk that resembledthe re-voicing moves O’Connor and Michaelsexamined, although it was not employed withdeliberate pedagogical intentions. Participantsmade connections between ideas discussed in onesession and another or related different episodes ofmentoring to each other and implicitly invitedcolleagues to agree with or offer counter explana-tions for the conjectures being presented. Theseforms of talk seemed to introduce an inquiryelement to the discourse based on the way theyinvited others to move beyond the immediatedescription of particular circumstances to connect

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them to other examples, or consider themfrom new perspectives, or in light of largerideas or principles, or in terms of underlyingassumptions.

One final element of the theoretical framework Ideveloped comes from Edelsky’s notion of the‘‘collaborative floor’’ in conversations. She definesthe floor as ‘‘the acknowledged what’s-going-onwithin a psychological time/space’’ (Edelsky,1993). I noticed that certain episodes of studygroup talk which seemed to result in significantand widely endorsed ideas grew out of conversa-tional interactions where the topic or ‘‘floor’’ ofthe conversation was constructed jointly by two ormore individuals engaged in sustained conversa-tion featuring several speaking turns by differentparticipants.

This theoretical framework can be summarizedas follows:

The CTSG was a Community of Practice inwhich participants engaged directly in indivi-dual and joint experiences of mentoring theirinterns and came together in study groupsessions for talk about that practice.Interactive Talk occurred in the CTSG whenparticipants attempted to negotiate and repre-sent the meaning of joint experience throughengaged participation in conversation.Participant Frameworks are episodes of inter-active talk in which negotiating and represent-ing meaning through talk occurred. Theyhappened both spontaneously and deliberatelyin conversation. They had the effect of aligningindividuals and ideas (content) under study.Re-voicing Moves are recurrent forms of parti-cipant frameworks that emerged over time inthe semi-formal deliberative context of thestudy group. They conveyed a speaker’s effortsto negotiate and represent the meaning of jointexperience and to align others with thatinterpretation or invite a contrasting one.They introduced an inquiry dimension to thetalk.A Collaborative Conversation Floor occurredwhen participants used re-voicing moves tojointly develop a floor or topic in the conversa-tion around a common idea.

3.1. Illustrating interactive talk from the study

group

The excerpt in Table 2 from the 3/25 CTSGsession can be used to illustrate this conceptualframework. At that time we were summarizing andconsolidating important insights developed fromthe joint study of our mentoring practice. Thebackground for this discussion stems from recog-nizing that the experienced teacher’s practice canbecome a central context for the novice’s learning.At first glance, it may seem obvious that noviceteachers would learn a great deal from observingan experienced teacher day in and day out.However, many interns do not necessarily noticewhat is significant and cannot easily ‘‘get inside’’the complex life of a classroom without assistance(Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985). Interns andother novices do not always see what we wantthem to see in classrooms. They also cannot easilytell what an experienced teacher is thinking abouther teaching as it unfolds in the classroom, andwhat on-the-spot decisions she is making to adapther plans to the situation (Jackson, 1968). Theymay also have difficulty framing questions aboutwhat they see because the range of activities anddetails can be overwhelming. CTs at Capitol cameto appreciate these difficulties over the year andtheir conversation illustrates how they learned totake both practical and intellectual steps to ‘‘openup’’ their teaching to their interns. Using theconceptual framework to analyze this conversa-tion will reveal the dynamics of interactive talkand its relationship to professional learning.

3.2. Interactive talk and participant frameworks

In Table 2, we see that as Pam, Anne, and laterSusan join into the conversation their statementsare both an occasion for thinking and a reflectionof the thinking each is doing. Wenger (1998) refersto this kind of interaction as ‘‘negotiating mean-ing’’ while participating in a community ofpractice. Our discussion at this time was initiatedby two guiding questions: ‘‘What do interns needto know and be able to do?’’ and ‘‘What can we doto support their learning?

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Table 2

An illustration of interactive talk

CTSG 3/25 transcript

Pam: I mean the first thing that comes to my mind was observationywhen they come in and they’re first observingyhow to

structure that soyand I think that to some degree they’re not going to be watching everything we want them to because

they’re not there yet but what kind of guidelines can we give them so they’ll notice what’s important?

Anne: One thing that worked really well for me last year with Kevin but did not work well this yearywasyhe and I spent quite

a lot of time where I was thinking out loud and going through my planning and saying how does this sound and he would

bounce an idea off of me and I off of him and he entered into considering the ideasyof course at that point in time the

decision was mineybut he had a chance to see that thinking out loud process and we did that a lot.

So, instead of my just sitting there and doing what I normally doyI did it in front of himyand we sort of talked as we

went along, collecting ideasythrowing out ideasyI did it all orally essentially and went through the step by step process

of planningyand he was participating in a way tooyhe came up with some ideas and he experienced that processy

Now that was not happening this year.

Pam: Why do you think it didn’t happen this year?

Anne: Well, with Brenda’s situationyshe didn’t have timeyshe had to get out of hereyit just didn’t worky. but I think it

would have made for better planning later if we’d gone through that period because she would have gotten a better idea

of how

Susan: I did a lot of what Anne was describingyconstantly talking out loudytalking through what we were going to do and

whyy

Anne: And did he takeydid she take notesyKevin last year took notes through all thatyand I said to himyjot down

questions and then after school that’s what we didywe went backyhe kind of de-briefed me

Pam: I like that

Susan: I think that’s an important piece

Pam: Karen did that and I think we did that sort of thing for someyI don’t know about Megan or Tammy?

Susan: Ben did that sort of thing when he came inybut to have them write down questionsy

Pam: Or us, asking themywhy do you think I did this instead of this? I mean if they’re not being ableymaybe that’s the first

checkpoint we should haveyif they’re not able to come up with observations and insightsywell why did you decide to

do this instead of thisythen we need to be asking them why


Pam introduces the topic of observation byinterns at the beginning of the school year. Sheoffers both a conjecture about interns as lear-ners—‘‘I think to some degree they’re not going tobe watching everything we want them toy’’—andan implicit inference about mentoring practice—that CTs will need to structure interns’ experienceby providing ‘‘guidelines’’ to help them ‘‘noticewhat’s important’’. By ending her comments withthe question, ‘‘what kind of guidelines can we givethemy’’, Pam’s remarks engage others in con-sidering the content of what she has said and inaligning themselves in relation to it. This is anexample of what Goodwin (1990) refers to as a‘‘participant framework’’, effectively opening upthe next turn in the discussion to someone who willrespond to that invitation. The participant frame-work invoked by Pam’s comment has the effect ofinviting others participating in the discussion to

consider her conjecture and implicit suggestionabout practice, thus engaging them in thinkingabout these ideas.

3.3. Developing a collaborative ‘‘floor’’ in the

discussion

Following Pam’s opening remark, we see howAnne responds to the participant frameworkinvoked by Pam’s invitation. She describes anapproach to mentoring she developed the previousyear with her intern, Kevin, whereby she instituteda regular after school de-briefing time to help himunderstand her teaching. By putting these ideas onthe table, Anne is herself invoking a participantframework. She is engaging other participants inconsidering a specific example about mentoringpractice and, in so doing, she is clarifying andarticulating a powerful underlying principle about

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mentoring. She describes it as a process of‘‘thinking out loud’’. This latter idea is an exampleof how certain kinds of interactive talk have aninquiry content based on the way they invite othersto consider experience in light of larger ideas orprinciples, or in terms of underlying assumptions.By calling her activity ‘‘thinking out loud’’, Anneis highlighting the educational significance of heraction as a mentor and conceptualizing it inrelation to a broader principle of mentoringpractice.

In response to Pam’s probing, Anne reveals thatthis de-briefing time has not worked so well thisyear because her current intern, Brenda, is unableto spend such expansive time with her after school.As this series of talking turns unfolds, we also seethe development of what Edelsky (1993) calls acollaborative floor in the discussion. Each succes-sive speaker is contributing to an evolving idea orcommon topic about helping interns learn fromobserving teaching. Conversations do not alwaysdevelop in this way in general or in the CTSG.People do not necessarily make sense of and buildupon one another’s ideas. They do not necessarilyask each other clarifying or probing questions, asPam did in this instance, to elicit further descrip-tion of an idea and negotiate its meaning. Whenthey do work collaboratively, however, and whenthey invoke participant frameworks that bring aninquiry orientation to the unfolding talk, partici-pants in interactive talk have the potential ofconstructing joint knowledge, as we will see inSection 3.4.

3.4. A collective warrant for particular mentoring

practices emerges

Susan echoes Anne’s enthusiasm for the kind of‘‘thinking out loud’’ she has described. Annecounters with a question to emphasize theimportance she places on having the intern writedown notes during such conferences. Susan andPam endorse this additional detail. Pam concludesthe interchange with the idea that on someoccasions it is important for the teacher to askthe intern directly about his or her observations orthinking if they are unable to come up withquestions and observations on their own.

The idea of ‘‘thinking out loud’’ is a basicstrategy for helping a novice learn in the context ofan experienced teacher’s practice, whether it be inthe context of planning, teaching, or reflectingafter teaching. Unless the experienced teachertakes deliberate steps to reveal her thinking tothe novice, important aspects of the decision-making and other intellectual work involved inthese fundamental tasks of teaching remaininvisible to the novice (Tomlinson, 1995). Anneand Susan were introduced to thinking out loudthe previous year when I worked with them withtheir first interns.

Now, with Anne’s anecdote, Susan is struck bythe additional idea of having the intern ‘‘writedown questions’’. For Susan, that phrase hadcome to have special meaning across the year. Oneof the insights she had learned in the process ofhelping her intern, Ben, in previous months, was toinsist that he articulate his own response to theirconversations, including putting essential elementsin writing so she could see what sense he wasactually making of their conversations.

In conjunction with this ‘writing down ques-tions’ strategy, Pam also introduces the idea thatthere should be ‘‘checkpoints’’ to clarify our jointexpectations and to alert CTs and myself topotential concerns about interns’ learning. Theidea of having the intern write down questions,and coining the term ‘‘checkpoints’’ emerges at theend of this extended collaborative floor in thediscussion. This term is used to describe theemerging understanding among teachers that theyneeded to take an active role in assessing interns’learning as part of their mentoring practice.

3.5. Interactive talk and joint knowledge

construction

In this one example, we see how three indivi-duals participating in interactive talk engaged eachother in new thinking and joint knowledgeconstruction. While their conversation evolvedspontaneously at the time, we can re-visit it usingthe analytic tools of the conceptual framework forunderstanding interactive talk to make visible howstudy group discourse influenced their professionallearning. The initial idea of ‘‘thinking out loud’’

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became articulated in a series of related practical‘‘mentoring moves’’ as they developed a colla-borative floor in their conversation. These movesincluded literally talking through one’s thinking,having the intern keep notes of out-loud talking,signaling the intern through ‘‘eye contact’’ whileteaching, and occasionally asking questions orhaving the intern write down questions to test his/her understanding of the teacher’s thinking.

By applying the participant frameworks con-struct to the analysis of in this interactive talk, wecan make visible how three individuals engagedeach other in inquiry-related tasks associated withthe intellectual work of teaching. These tasksincluded identifying underlying principles andcentral features of learning experiences, re-cyclingideas from earlier experiences with practice tocontribute to new contexts, and generating mu-tually warranted norms and expectations for acommon practice of mentoring. In short, they haveconstructed joint knowledge about mentoringpractice.

8In a warranted inference, ‘‘the speaker is linking his/her

utterance to that of the previous speaker and is making an

inference that she believes to be warranted based on the

previous utterance’’ (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993).

3.6. Forms of interactive talk: re-voicing moves

I further refined my analysis by examining studygroup sessions from across the year and identifiedthe following five related forms of interactive talkin the transcripts which I refer to collectively as‘‘re-voicing moves’’.7 These moves functioned asparticipant frameworks in the way they focusedattention in the group on ideas about mentoringand implicated participants conversationally inagreeing or disagreeing with them or offeringadditional viewpoints. Re-voicing moves typicallyhad the effect of introducing an inquiry perspec-tive into our study group talk as speakers usedthem to engage others in considering ideas fromdifferent perspectives.

9To prepare this representative set of transcript excerpts, I

reviewed entire transcripts for seven of the nine sessions. For
�
O’

sta

are

one session the recording equipment failed. One session was not

transcribed due to its similarity to the preceding session. To

Re-stating: Repeating an idea to invite addi-tional attention or concurrence.

choose excerpts I first eliminated administrative or ‘‘business’’
� Re-cycling: Re-introducing an idea from earlier
7The idea of ‘‘re-voicing’’ moves in general comes from

Connor and Michaels, (1993). The additional variations (re-

ting, re-conceptualizing, re-contextualizing, and re-cycling

inspired by ideas in Cazden (1988).

tal

art

me

kin

int

in the session to position it in relation to acurrent observation.

�
Re-conceptualizing: Developing or broadeningan example into a more general idea.
�
Re-contextualizing: Shifting the perspectivesbrought to bear on it.
�
Making a warranted inference:8 To make aninference based on the previous speaker’scomment and implicitly invite concurrence ordisagreement.
While the participant framework constructallows for the close analysis of particular speechepisodes, it also provides an analytic frameworkfor examining a series of discussions among agroup of colleagues over time. This is becauseindividuals who come together regularly fordiscussion build a common repertoire of partici-pant frameworks, such as the re-voicing movesdescribed above, which they apply recurrently,although selectively and responsively, in differentcontexts. I identified this taxonomy of re-voicingmoves inductively by analyzing study grouptranscripts after the fact. Then, by examining towhat extent and under what circumstances CTSGparticipants engaged in re-voicing moves acrossCTSG sessions I tracked the development ofinquiry-oriented talk over time. To do this, Iconstructed a representative set of detailed tran-script excerpts which reflected the talk across allstudy group sessions.9 I then tracked the presenceand frequency of re-voicing moves across the year.

In Section 4, I will use the theoretical frameworkpresented here to further examine the way in whichcertain episodes of group talk, such as the example

k. Next I categorized talk into times when we were examining

ifacts of teaching versus sharing more informal accounts of

ntoring experience. I then chose samples of each of those

ds of talk attempting to collect the fullest possible range of

erchanges.

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in Table 2, featured the collaborative constructionof a common topic or idea (Edelsky, 1993) aboutmentoring. Subsequent references to such ideas, inwhich participants engaged each other in inter-active talk featuring the kinds of re-voicing movesdescribed above, and constructed collaborative‘‘floors’’ in their conversation, fostered a collectivewarranting process by which emerging ideasgained credibility in the group. This capacity toserve as a seed bed for the joint construction andmutual endorsement of ideas about practice seemsto be an important potential of such study groups,and a defining feature of professional communitiesof practice. The concepts for understandinginteractive talk presented here will serve as analytictools for linking interactive talk and the develop-ment of a professional community of practice inSection 4.

4. Part Two: using analytic tools to investigate the

joint construction and collective warranting of ideas

in forming a professional community of practice

4.1. Locating a key moment in study group talk

I developed my analysis of the joint constructionof ideas in the study group after sensing a criticalmoment in the study group session at which wegenerated a plan to create the Curriculum forLearning to Teach at Capitol. This key momentoccurred on March 9, our seventh session, whenSusan presented video and text documentation ofher work with her intern, Ben, about planning andteaching a unit on transportation in her kinder-garten classroom. We realized that there werebasic ideas about planning which Ben only came tounderstand in the fifth month of his internshipwith Susan’s assistance on this unit. Martha thensuggested that there must be things which we couldcollectively do nearer the beginning of the schoolyear to help interns get a better start on learning toplan. Susan later nudged us toward action, saying‘‘Well I think maybe something for us to work onfor next year is coming up with some of those keythings for us to work on as CTsy’’ We drafted theCurriculum on chart paper at our next session,

drawing upon insights generated from our studygroup sessions across the year to that point.

4.2. Pursuing a conjecture about the collaborative

construction of our talk

In examining the talk around that critical ideaon March 9, I developed a conjecture that thepoints in the discussion which featured significantinsights or recommendations for ourselves seemedto occur in conjunction with a collaborativeconstruction of the focus or ‘‘floor’’ of ourconversation. Our discussion seemed to ‘‘takeoff’’ from an observation by Pam about Ben as alearner. Partly with Martha’s input, we began totalk about what interns needed to ‘‘bring to thetable’’ in preparation for planning, and what weneeded to do to help them. The content of thisepisode represented important ideas about men-toring associated both with considering interns aslearners and assuming a more active role asteacher educators. I wanted to know more abouthow these ideas arose at that point in that session,and what it was about the character of our talkwhich fostered the joint construction of thoseideas. It seemed that inquiry in a group settingwould require, to some extent, the collaborativeconstruction of the floor of the conversation, so Ifocused my analysis in particular on that aspect ofour talk.

Edelsky (1993) has studied the collaborativeconstruction of the floor in professional conversa-tions among colleagues and developed ideas whichwere useful in considering how talk developed inthe CTSG. To pursue my analysis systematically, Iused the same set of transcript excerpts I hadpreviously prepared. I catalogued the topics ofthese conversations to generate generic categoriesof the kinds of mentoring content represented inthe transcripts. That would enable me to examinehow re-voicing moves were used to align partici-pants around mentoring content in interactivetalk. I deliberately framed these descriptions inlanguage related to the conception of ‘‘educativementoring’’ (Feiman-Nemser, 1996) whichmatched the inquiry orientation toward mentoringpractice which I had been hoping to foster amongCTSG participants. According to Feiman-Nemser,

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those who assume the practice of educativementoring:

�
think about mentoring as a form of teachingand take on an educative role,
�
see novices as learners and attend to how theythink and what they believe and to their ways ofmaking sense of experience,
�
focus novices’ attention on pupils’ thinking andsense making,
�
have a vision of good teaching, � have a theory of learning to teach and a
repertoire of mentoring moves.

I wanted to note when talk with this kind ofmentoring content occurred in the study group. Isaw identifying the mentoring content of our talkas a crucial element in determining how and whatpeople had the opportunity to learn in the studygroup. In order to bring as much consistency andrigor as possible into the analysis, I searched forthe widest array of comments which exemplifiedthe educative mentoring framework to develop acatalog of mentoring content present in thetranscripts. The list below summarizes the kindsof mentoring content I found in analyzing the setof transcripts from across the year.

�
Identifying and articulating elements of a visionof good teaching as represented in observationsand descriptions of artifacts of teaching orelements of that practice.
�
Identifying ways for CTs/liaison to help internsnotice and learn to analyze elements of goodteaching.
�
Drawing pedagogical implications of interns’actions as represented in observations anddescriptions of artifacts of interns’ practice ordescriptions of interns’ actions.
�
Sharing ideas about pedagogical conversationswith interns.
�
Analyzing mentoring ‘‘moves’’ as represented inobservations and descriptions of teachers’/liai-son’s practice.
�
Making observations or conjectures or infer-ences about interns as learners.
�
Making observations or conjectures or infer-ences about learning to teach.
I also examined the transcript set for evidence of‘‘re-voicing’’ moves. I wanted to explore how theseforms of interactive talk may have helped achievewhat O’Connor and Michaels described as thealignment of participants in relation to each otherand the propositional (mentoring) content of thetalk. In the course of that analysis, I also foundnumerous examples of participants making whatO’Connor and Michaels (1993) described as‘‘warranted inferences’’. This combination of re-voicing moves, conjectures, and inferences seemedto me to offer a way of describing what made upthe inquiry orientation of our talk and ofdetermining its presence or absence at any givenpoint in the talk. Concurring with O’Connor andMichaels, I thought it should also be the case thatwhen CTSG participants engaged each other intalk with a mentoring content, and used the kindsof inquiry-oriented speech moves listed above,they should experience opportunities for learningabout mentoring.

4.3. Linking re-voicing moves and ‘‘joint floors’’ to

analyze the joint construction and collective

warranting of ideas

With these analytic tools in hand, I conductedanother analysis of the set of study grouptranscripts, beginning with breaking the talk intosegments representing shifts in the ‘‘floor’’ ortopic. Next I catalogued the presence of mentoringcontent and re-voicing moves or other inquiry-oriented speaking turns. Finally, drawing uponEdelsky’s notion of a ‘‘joint floor’’, I looked foroccasions when the topic or idea around which ourtalk was focused seemed to be jointly developed. Ihad a hunch that a basic aspect of generating theCurriculum had to do with the way in which theideas were collectively warranted, and not justendorsed by one teacher and myself. Therefore, Ilooked for occasions when two or more indivi-duals (not counting myself) exchanged four ormore substantive talking turns around a commonfloor or topic about mentoring and which includedan inquiry orientation according to the way I hadcharacterized re-voicing moves inductively fromthe transcripts.

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In my analysis of seven of the nine10 study groupsessions, I found 38 such episodes of extended,jointly constructed, and collectively warrantedideas about mentoring practice. I next went backto the Curriculum to see how many of them endedup in its text. I found that virtually every idea wasrepresented in the Curriculum, and that thoseideas were essentially what the Curriculum con-sisted of. Considering that the Curriculum wasdrafted at one session without any detailedexamination of records from past sessions, and itrepresented participants’ understandings and as-pirations at that time about their mentoringpractice, it seems plausible to conclude that thejointly constructed and warranted ideas tookspecial root in the landscape of their learningacross the year. Those were the ideas which stuckand proved most powerful for them.

The development and implementation of theCurriculum for Learning to Teach at Capitolrepresented a performance test(Perkins, 1998) forthe kinds of new understandings about mentoringpractice which CTSG participants constructedtogether. Their mentoring changed as their under-standing of learning to teach and using theirpractice to scaffold their interns’ learning devel-oped. They took on increased responsibility foractions like demonstrating their own planning indetail and creating ‘‘checkpoints’’ for assessingtheir interns’ progress. The conceptual frameworkfor understanding interactive talk enabled me tomake visible analytically how their learningoccurred through the joint construction andcollaborative warranting of ideas over time in thestudy group. This process also transformed thestudy group itself from a gathering of mentorteachers into a seedbed for ongoing learning as aprofessional community of practice.

5. Part Three: leadership for inquiry-oriented

professional discourse

In this section, I shift perspective from examin-ing how participants engaged in talk which led to

10One session was not transcribed; the recording equipment

malfunctioned in the other.

professional learning, to analyzing the kinds ofleadership moves I made to enable such learningthrough collective inquiry-oriented talk. I begin bysummarizing and analyzing the range of materialsand associated learning tasks I generated for studygroup sessions. Next I examine the range of myown participation in the study group and considermy role in fostering inquiry-oriented discourse. Ipresent three recurrent circumstances in studygroup talk and give examples of my participationin them. Finally, I summarize the interactive anddynamic demands of leadership for this kind ofcollective study group inquiry.

5.1. Developing materials of practice and learning

tasks for the study group

A fundamental aspect of initiating and facilitat-ing the kind of inquiry-oriented talk about practicewhich occurred in the CTSG involved generatingmaterials of practice and analytic tasks forinvestigating them. One way I approached thisterritory of designing materials and tasks tosupport mentor teachers’ learning about mentor-ing was to link tasks of mentoring with funda-mental tasks of teaching.11 An inherent idea ineducative mentoring is that the mentoring rela-tionship is situated in joint practice betweenmentor and novice. Mentors need to develop theircapacity to model and talk about the key tasks ofteaching. For example, if a key task of teachinginvolves planning for instruction, the mentor’swork begins with ‘‘co-planning’’ with the novicearound the mentor’s own teaching. By modelingand thinking out loud the mentor helps the novicelearn about aspects of planning such as getting adeep understanding of the subject matter, explor-ing resources, planning appropriate learning activ-ities, considering students’ prior knowledge andexperiences with the topic, and considering how toassess students’ learning. As the novice’s learningprogresses, the context for this joint work gradu-ally shifts from the mentor’s teaching to thenovice’s. In similar fashion, the mentor introducesthe novice to other key tasks of teaching, in each

11For this idea I am indebted to my colleague and mentor,

Sharon Feiman-Nemser.

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case beginning with the joint work situated in thementor’s own practice.

I began the year with no specific design for howwe would use our study group sessions. I simplyfelt intuitively that I needed to look for opportu-nities to capture important aspects of the work ofmentoring in text or videotape so that we couldstudy it in the group. My first opportunity came asI was observing one mentor (Sandy) teach a lessonwith her intern (Megan) sitting beside me. Later, Iinterviewed Megan about what she hadnoticed. This activity, which we called ‘‘co-obser-ving’’, was designed to get access to what theintern was noticing and thus point her mentorteacher and me toward ways of enlarging herperspective. To use this experience in ourstudy group, I generated a written text of myobservation of Sandy and summarized my inter-view with Megan. The teachers and I firstexamined the observation of Sandy’s teaching toidentify things we felt would be important for anintern to notice, then we contrasted that with whatMegan had attended to. This simple comparisonworked well to alert us to how interns’ perceptionsdiffered from those of experienced teachers andhelped us begin to inquire into their perspectives aslearners.

As the year unfolded, I particularly focused onthe activities of planning and instruction ingenerating artifacts. These tasks emerged as majorchallenges for several interns and I sought outopportunities to document different aspects ofthem. I participated in, recorded, and transcribed aco-planning session with Sandy and Megan inDecember. Later in January and February Ivideotaped another planning session with thatpair, and then videotaped Megan’s teaching. Ilater documented a similar series between Susanand her intern, Ben. In the study group, our typicaltask was to study the artifacts in detail to makesense of what was going on in these mentoringinteractions—what work were we doing as men-tors; what sense was the intern making?

In this way, we generated all of the materials weused in the study group. As Ball and Cohen (1999)advise in their proposal for a pedagogy forprofessional development, the materials we fo-cused on were ‘‘grounded in the activities of

practice’’ and provided us with ‘‘opportunities toinvestigate and construct knowledge central toteaching’’ (or in our case, mentoring). I also cameto realize that by joining with other participants inexamining my own practice and making it avail-able in the form of artifacts, the contrast betweenmy own approach to mentoring and that ofdifferent teachers provided a considerable rangeof perspectives.

For example, I videotaped my own conversationwith Megan after teaching the unit she and Sandyand I had co-planned. In the study group, weanalyzed that conversation and the ‘‘moves’’ Imade and how Megan responded. This helpedSandy begin to see some new ways of engagingMegan in conversation about her teaching, parti-cularly in regard to drawing out her thinkingabout the choices she had made in teaching. Inanalyzing records of my work, however, I wascareful not to set it up as an example of ‘‘bestpractice’’. On the contrary, I typically madespecific criticisms of my own practice in the groupto invite others to do the same. This did notrequire dissembling on my part. I began the yearwith a considerably underdeveloped understand-ing of how interns learn to plan. In working withvarious interns, I made numerous missteps andmiscalculations, yet I also learned in the companyof my CTSG colleagues. By joining in theexamination of practice as a colleague with otherparticipants, and by publicly recognizing myself asa learner in reflecting on uncertainties about myown practice, I was able to make my practice oneof the contexts for our collective learning, withoutsetting it up as a normative model.

5.2. Analyzing my participation in the CTSG as

study group leader

In considering leadership issues in the CTSG, itis also useful to examine the range of myparticipation in CTSG sessions. My participationreflects the fact that I chose to engage in the studygroup as both a participant and discussionfacilitator. This is an essential element of the kindof leadership role I constructed for myself, and willplay a part in the subsequent analysis.

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Before proceeding with that analysis, however,it is important to consider another importantdimension of the CTSG as a context for exploringdiscourse which fosters inquiry. In comparisonwith some other teacher study groups reported inthe literature (Philadelphia Teachers LearningCooperative, 1984; Cochran Smith, 1993; Feath-erstone & Pfeiffer, 1996), the CTSG was justventuring into the territory of inquiry, even byyear’s end. Participants in this study group had notgone out of their way to find a teacher study groupfocused on inquiring into mentoring. Instead theygraciously accepted an invitation to do somethingthey had little previous awareness of. While weconstructed important joint insights from ourefforts, this is essentially an account of gettingthe disposition toward and the capacity forcollective inquiry underway. Traditional schoolculture rarely prepares teachers to value theusefulness or validity of collective inquiry amongpractitioners. Their experiences with professionaldevelopment have prepared most teachers to seeknowledge as something that comes from outside,not something constructed jointly in and aroundtheir practice (Cochran Smith, 1993; Little, 1993).While in recent years, many teachers have takenbold steps to break out of these epistemologicalfetters, most teachers have not, including those inthe CTSG as it began. It is from that broaderstandpoint that I believe that my leadership role inthe CTSG was most necessary. No doubt, otherimportant dimensions of the relationship betweendiscourse and inquiry, and different aspects ofleadership would come into play in a group withmore experience with and commitment to inquiryover time.

Earlier in the article I presented an analysis ofthe way in which participant frameworks wereinvoked in the CTSG in the course of interactivetalk, resulting under certain circumstances ininquiry-oriented talk about mentoring and thejoint construction of ideas about mentoringpractice. Now I want to re-visit the context ofthat analysis and examine my role in promotinginquiry in CTSG sessions.

To do that, I reviewed a set of transcriptsrepresentative of our whole series of sessions,collecting and analyzing my own contributions to

the discourse to characterize those contributions ina similar way to that presented in analyzing otherparticipants’ talk described previously. I noted ahigh frequency of ‘‘re-voicing’’ moves on my part,as well as a pattern of making conjectures orinferences. In addition, there are several occasionswhen I modeled basic inquiry processes such asgrounding comments in evidence, and invitingelaboration, and conjectures from others. Thesewere important dimensions of my role as groupparticipant.

To consider more specifically how my leadershipof CTSG discourse fostered inquiry, I will examinethree kinds of recurrent roles which I played: (1)facilitating analytic tasks, (2) thinking ‘‘out loud’’about my own mentoring moves, and (3) posingtasks to consolidate learning.

5.3. Facilitating analytic tasks

Most typical of my role was simply creating andfacilitating analytic tasks around artifacts oraccounts of mentoring practice. I frequentlydirected study group participants’ attention toparticular portions of artifacts, whether in text orvideo form. In the work just described with Sandyand Megan, I invited group members to study ourco-planning conversation and make conjecturesabout what we seemed to be doing at variouspoints in the conversation. This was not done fromthe standpoint of getting them to ‘‘find’’ answerswhich I had pre-determined. Rather, it was agenuine effort to make collective sense of what weobserved in the artifacts. At other times, I invitedthem to consider what sense Megan seemed to bemaking and how that was evident in the artifact. Idirected our collective attention in these ways,using the analytic task of interpreting our mentor-ing moves. I was able to position study groupparticipants in relation to ideas about mentoringthat arose among us in the course of our study andto invite them to articulate what sense they weremaking for each other. Guiding the analysis of theartifacts in this way enabled me to use mycomments to encourage others to articulatesome of the key ideas and principles implied byour talk.

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5.4. Thinking ‘‘out loud’’

A second recurrent role that the joint analysis ofan artifact or account of my own mentoringpractice allowed me to play was to offer furtherinterpretation of my own moves—to ‘‘think outloud’’ myself. On occasions when we were studyingartifacts that featured my own mentoring practice,I would sometimes make use of the same ‘‘thinkingout loud’’ idea which we had developed for CTs touse with interns, but employ it to reveal mythinking as a mentor. In that sense, I was‘‘thinking out loud’’ with them to explain thethinking behind my words as they appeared in thetranscript of the planning session. As describedearlier, this kind of move also enabled me tointroduce new or contrasting perspectives aboutmentoring to the group, such as taking steps todraw out interns’ thinking about their choices inplanning or teaching.

5.5. Posing tasks to consolidate learning

A third role which I played frequently was topose a particular task to pull together or con-solidate ideas emerging from our conversation at agiven point in a study group session. For example,after we analyzed the transcript of the co-planningsession among Megan, Sandy, and myself, I feltthat we had just come to some tentative collectiveinsights about interns’ needs in learning to plan,and I wanted to consolidate them more deliber-ately, lest they be forgotten. Accordingly, I askedpeople at that point to try to articulate what Icalled a ‘‘curriculum for learning to plan’’. We didthat and were able to pull together some initialideas. At the same time, I recognized that we werestill coming at this territory from several differentperspectives. Rather than push for consensus, Idrafted notes after the session which attempted tocapture some of the central issues and dilemmaswe were contending with. In writing the notes, Ideliberately reflected our continuing disagreementsand uncertainties by framing questions we werestill struggling with, or by literally noting ourcontradictory viewpoints. It is an importantfunction of leadership in this kind of activity to

record the evolving ideas and circulate them backinto the conversation.

5.6. The challenges of providing leadership for

interactive talk

Earlier in this section, I explored the kinds ofmaterials we used and the tasks we took on toexplore mentoring practice jointly in the studygroup. As was evident from that account, this kindof professional development occasion does nothappen ‘‘spontaneously’’, as Ball and Cohen(1999) note. It requires considerable forethoughtand preparation, and the development of particu-lar materials that will enable participants toengage in constructing understandings about coreaspects of the practice. Following upon thatpreparation, we saw how particular kinds ofleadership ‘‘moves’’ are needed in fostering,refocusing, sustaining, and consolidating inquiry,and thus the joint construction of knowledgeamong participants. With that backdrop, it isapparent how complex it is to conduct this kind ofinquiry-oriented talk in a study group format.Leadership for this kind of activity requires aknowledge of the terrain of teaching in question, inthis case, mentoring, in order to constructmaterials that address essential tasks of thepractice.

This kind of leadership also requires orchestrat-ing such tasks flexibly, invoking inquiry norms andprocesses responsively, recognizing critical ideas asthey arise in participants’ comments, and main-taining an inquiry mode in managing the responseto such issues. There is a repertoire to bedeveloped around this kind of professional devel-opment practice, associated with the sorts of ‘‘re-voicing’’ moves I identified, with the spontaneousposing of tasks to consolidate emerging under-standings, and the related activities of summariz-ing talk and generating written notes to createtexts of the groups’ evolving ideas. Finding theright words for ‘‘re-voicing’’ comments demands ablend of genuine curiosity about others’ ideas anda tactful command of language to present thoughtsin respectful but clear terms. This goes beyondpopular conceptions of ‘‘active listening’’ whereone might simply re-state what someone else has

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said. To be effective and helpful for others’negotiation of meaning, the group leader’s re-voicing comments need to pick up on largerpatterns of ideas lurking in the details of theongoing conversation and rebroadcast them inways that enable new perspectives or apparentunderlying principles to be apprehended.

Leadership for enacting inquiry-oriented profes-sional development thus involves a series ofinterrelated dimensions which must be orche-strated responsively. The inquiry focus puts one’scrucial attention on the learners and understand-ing the sense they are making, as Duckworth(1987) advises. Yet in order to be in a position tomake such an effort, and to focus the learning onthe right target, one must construct materials andmake appropriate plans to enable participants tomake sense of central activities of the practiceunder study. In the case of the CTSG, I was able tointroduce different and contrasting artifacts ofpractice by making my own, as well as otherparticipants’ practice the context for our study.We also see how enacting this kind of inquiry-oriented practice requires a repertoire of ‘‘moves’’to promote inquiry—moves which are easy to getwrong. It requires a flexible knowledge of theterritory of practice under study to enableresponsive facilitation of talk and the alignmentand repositioning of participants with respect toeach other and key ideas.

6. Conclusion

Nearly all teacher education programs face thechallenge of helping the mentor teachers theydepend upon become engaged in the role ofmentor and learn a repertoire of mentoringpractices. This study suggests that teacher studygroups offer one promising avenue for supportingsuch learning. While the work presented here isexploratory, it points to significant dimensions ofstudy group interaction which can promoteprofessional learning. At the same time this workcontributes to what I hope will be a growingliterature of accounts of school-based teachereducation work by providing images and repre-

sentations of inquiry-oriented mentoring practiceand how it can be learned.

Although focused on developing teachers’ un-derstanding about and practice of mentoring, thisstudy also offers wider insight about and providesan example of the kind of professional learningneeded to promote inquiry-oriented practice moregenerally. Ball and Cohen (1999) have argued forthe value of situating such learning in the contextof materials of practice, and have suggested ideasabout the kind of discourse about such materialsthat would promote inquiry-oriented learning. Inthis study, we saw how, by fostering interactivetalk around artifacts of mentoring practice, devel-oped out of the practice of CTSG participants, wewere able to jointly construct understandings ofmentoring practice. I examined the features of ourtalk which seemed to promote inquiry, particularlyemphasizing the collaborative construction of the‘‘floor’’ and ‘‘re-voicing’’ strategies that had theeffect of aligning participants in relation to eachother and to ideas about mentoring. It would beuseful to investigate other contexts for profes-sional discourse to see if these ideas provide auseful lens for analyzing inquiry-oriented talk. Itwould also be interesting to examine the discoursein other experienced study groups to see if theconstructs proposed here to describe the jointconstruction and collective warranting of ideas areapplicable in other communities of professionalpractice.

I also focused upon the qualities and skills ofleadership needed to promote inquiry-orientedprofessional learning. I analyzed the role that Iplayed in developing materials of practice, indesigning analytic tasks, in modeling re-voicingmoves myself, and in directing the flow ofconversation to promote inquiry. Taken together,these dimensions of the leadership role callattention to the challenges of finding or developingpersons with the experience and capacity to fulfillsuch roles. As with other forms of inquiry-orientedpractice, this practice of leadership also needs tobe learned in and through practice. Hopefully, thisaccount may be of use to others in venturing intothat territory.

A final contribution of this study is to introducea potentially useful analytic approach for studying

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how learning occurs through interactive talk. Theconstruct of participant frameworks offers apromising approach to analyzing how participa-tion in certain kinds of inquiry-oriented talkpromotes learning, and to identifying evidence ofsuch learning. In this case, I directed the focus ofmy use of the participant framework constructtoward mentoring and inquiry content. In othercases, it could work equally well, I believe, toexamine content around such things as historylearning or literacy instruction. Providing evidenceof the link between reform-oriented professionallearning opportunities focusing on discourse, suchas teacher study groups, and participants’ resultinglearning, is a recognized need in current educa-tional research (Wilson & Berne, 1999). Theusefulness of the analytic approach employed inthis study warrants further investigation of theseideas in other contexts.

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