Mentoring is often portrayed as an unqualified good. Teacher educators claim that mentoring holds promise for beginning teacher development, increased retention of novice teachers, and mentor-teacher improvement. Drawing on positioning theory, this study describes negotiation of power and position in a failed triad composed of a public school…

This article is a follow-up to a larger study of 23 interns, drawn from a sample of approximately 100 elementary interns, and their year-long development. Teacher vulnerability was a dominating theme of that study, and several sources were identified and explored that mostly paralleled those discussed in the wider literature including the external…