A Training for a clinical approach in tutoring and mentoring teacher trainees

2018 Summer Global Conference on Education
Paper:
A training for a clinical approach in tutoring and mentoring teacher trainees
A psychoanalytical conception
A time of seeing, a time of understanding and a moment of concluding
Dr. Jean-Marie Weber
Senior lecturer and researcher
University of Luxembourg

Today the professionalization of tutors is absolutely necessary. This means that tutors become competent to accompany teacher trainees in her singularity and to experience what effect has the tutoring in own body. (Freud). In Luxembourg teacher trainees are accompanied by tutors and mentors during their initiation. Some qualitative research-studies indicated that tutors are playing a key role in the training of student teachers. These investigations revealed success and hindering factors in tutoring, conflicts and challenges existing in the relationship between the tutor and the tutee. (Weber, 2008; 2011) On the basis of these studies, the university of Luxembourg proposes since 2013 a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) of 20 ECTS, called: “tutoring and mentoring”.
The aspects treated are:
- Reflect the needs, demands and desires of the young teachers;

- Develop the professional skills required of a tutor:
o competences on the level of observing and analysing situations of teaching and learning in the classroom;
o competences of supporting trainees to analyse and reflect their practice,
o competences of consulting,
o competences of supporting the teacher trainees to transform her desires in a professional project and of evaluating a training process.

- Being aware that the tutor /mentor /supervisor is not the person who has to propose his knowledge how to teach in every situation but has the role to support the teacher trainee to discover and to develop his own knowledge

In this paper, I want to develop the psychoanalytical approach behind the clinical settings of this training. I shall also analyse some examples from the effect of this approach.
Inspired by the Lacanian concept of “Logic time” and its dialectical structure of
- The instant of seeing
- The time of understanding
- The moment of concluding
we constructed three clinical settings:
Setting 1: Analyzing situations of a teacher-movies trough a role-play
We watch and analyze sequences of teacher movies to make then role plays concerning the analyzing of the filmed situation. Our students have to play the role of the tutor or of the trainee in a follow up conversation.
Setting 2: Analyzing the own practice as tutor

Each participant of the course presents a situation of tutoring. It’s analyzed from the point of view of unconscious transferences and counter-transferences, the demands, resistances and desires.

Setting 3: Observation and discussion about a follow up conversation
A member of the course-staff observes and analyzes with the prospective tutors one follow up conversation with his trainee.
Through all these settings the future tutors learn to analyze with their trainees the learn- und teaching-situations also with the Lacanian categories of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real and transferences. They develop their expertise to work with the resistances of the trainees.
I shall present how the tutors took advantage of the succession of these three settings. I will show how the concept of logical time allowed me to perform the settings thereby the students got able to transform their singular challenges concerning occupying the position of a tutor.
This setting constitutes a creative approach in the sense that the tutor does not learn to apply simply strategies, concepts and preconceived observation grids, but learns through the clinical analysis of his own practice. He is trained to get involved in a clinical way. He learns to guide the trainee to be able to reflect on his transfers, the place from which he speaks and acts with his pupils and his relationship to knowledge.