The power of pause: experienced and novice teachers developing dimensions of expertise through video collaboration software

This paper analyses interactions between initial teacher education (ITE) students and teacher educators in a UK university, when reflecting upon teaching behaviours. It aimed to trial the use of video collaboration software for enabling reflective practice, to support experienced teachers' mentoring skills and novice teachers’ reflective skills. The software provided an opportunity to record behaviour and interactions in school-based and online teaching sessions. Employing an ethnographic methodology, this study analysed professional dialogues between mentors and ITE students to explore the role of the video collaboration software for mentoring and reflection. It supports the vision that mentoring is a process of collaborative self-development. It also found that video collaboration software builds metacognition around teaching expertise in a peer-to-peer scenario. Through this process, mentors gained reflective skills and benefitted from the dialogue around pedagogical decisions as much as the novices. The study concludes that a process of discourse and dialogue where the agency is held with the teacher rather than the mentor improves novice teachers’ reflective skills associated with dimensions of expertise.