What a great reading list! I am very excited.

I liked the action research article a lot. I have used action research as part of the practicum for my graduate assistants and has been very informative of their practices in the classroom. We first discuss about this kind of research. At the beginning, they think that research should be doing by researchers, not teachers or that they don't have enough tools to make research. Once they engage in their projects, they see the value, they share with other graduate assistants and we all learn about the program and the students.

Is anyone else having problems accessing the action research article by Ganz? Or is it just me?

Malderez (2009) says, "...a mentoring process as being supportive of the transformation of development of the mentee and of their acceptance into a professional community...It is this process of one-to-one, workplace-based, contingent and personally appropriate support for the person during their professional acclimatization (or integration), learning, growth and development, which is referred to as Mentoring."

So, how would one define "acceptance into a professional community"? And what is exactly, "professional acclimatization"?

I would argue that neither of these two notions have much to do with mentoring. Mentoring is less about helping someone else enter a group, community, or school , and is more about facilitating another educator's personal growth. The individual (i.e., mentee) will decide on what communities to participate in, which people to interact with, and which technologies to use to make it all happen. So in essence, everyone the individual interacts with has the potential to serve as "mentor(s)" depending on the situation at that particular moment.

True, mentoring is about an educator's, in fact, any professional's growth-both personal and professional. Perhaps, Malderez is talking about the principles that define a role and the explicit and implicit rules of a professoin which a new entrant to a profession learns during the process of 'acclimatization or intgegration'. What do the others say?

I like the discussion of the terminology used to refer to different roles people can assume when working with novice teachers (supervisor, mentor). Other terms I have seen is coach, school cooperating teacher - for student-teachers, etc. An interesting article on language teaching coaching is the one by Arieh Sherris (2010). Coaching Language Teachers. CAL digest. www.cal.org. A very important aspect discussed in Malderez (2009) is the role of assessment in the mentoring process. In a mentor-mentee relationship, assessment is not a component as it is in the supervisor-new teacher case.
Also, can any of the moderators provide a full reference for the article by Díaz Maggioli?

Yuly, thank you for providing the reference to the article by Arieh Sherris. You are right that in a mentor-mentee relationship there is no assessment in the usual sense of the term, But I feel self-evaluation is a major aspect using which the mentee seeks support and guidance.

I found the reference to Gabriel Daiz's article. It is -Diaz-Maggioli (2003). ERIC Digest. http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/0303diaz.html This article outlines elements of quality professional development and delineates different strategies to address diverse teacher needs, skills, and knowledge.

Yuly, I mentioned an older article of Gabriel's. I have found it very useful to learn the basics of mentoring. Perhaps you might have read it. Trying to locate the reference of the artcle on our reading list.

I finished to experiment Action Research last month and I’d like to share it with you. The experience refers to the design and implementation of a short pilot course of Italian in Second Life® (SL), La Lingua in gioco: dire, fare e giocare in SL(Playing with language: telling, doing and playing in SL). The project had a strong focus on the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and Oral Language Proficiency and was aimed at a group of third-level Irish students of Italian in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), who now are spending the third year of their degree in Italy (Erasmus programme). This was a focused and a qualitative study. My interest was:
• to analyse critically the methodology and the tasks in order to isolate instances of disruption in communication and evidentiate solutions and ideas of best practice;
• to observe which SL affordances are available to design tasks for the development of ICC;
• to evaluate “how” and “how much” quizzes and games give new opportunities to practice Italian and “if” students feel involved when they are learning by playing.
Collection of data included both qualitative and quantitative methods through many sources and allowed for data triangulation, that helped reduce the likelihood of error in the findings of this study when similar results were reported from two or more of the sources. In order to reduce the volume of collected information, the data were identified and organized into important patterns and themes without minimizing or distorting any data. For the purpose of this study, self-report in the form of interviewing, direct observation, surveys, pre and post questionnaires, diaries and journals, blogs and wiki’s history pages, video recordings and transcriptions have been selected because they provide the most accurate information regarding the effectiveness of the study in the researchers’ current environment.

Any of you can tell me where I can find the 5th document about "Ways of Mentoring" ? Thx

Thanks for providing the reference to Gabriel's article, Marina. Look forward to it.