Mentoring Preservice Teachers Through Practice ─ A Framework for Coaching With CARE

This timely and practical guide supports and challenges cooperating teachers to grow in their mentoring and coaching practices with preservice teachers and also in their own work as classroom teachers. Taking a reflective stance that puts students at the center of teacher preparation and places value on apprenticeship and participation in learning, the CARE model is a framework for action that helps cultivate a perspective on teaching that is driven by students’ needs. Building on the authors’ own work with cooperating teachers, it is based on the most recent research on learning to teach and supporting preservice teachers and grounded in the realities of teacher education today. Taking a turn away from traditional evaluation-based "training" approaches, the CARE model offers a way cooperating teachers, and facilitators and university teacher educators who work with them, to come together to shape innovative coaching and mentoring experiences for preservice teachers.

Each chapter includes questions for discussion, and suggested readings that can be used to explore the focus for the chapter more deeply as well as relevant research reports the authors have published around the model. Video cases showing the CARE model in action are available on the accompanying website.

Melissa Wetzel is Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

James V. Hoffman is a Professor of Language and Literacy Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Beth Maloch is Associate Dean of Teacher Education, Student Affairs, and Administration College of Education, University of Texas at Austin, USA.