The CATESOL Journal

As teacher educators (TEs), we have a unique and remarkable opportunity to mentor the next generation of teachers. Over the years, our teacher candidates (TCs) have reported a sense of cognitive and affective dissonance while engaging in their culminating master's research requirement as part of a research seminar course. Cognitively, this research study requires knowledge-generation quite different from research they engaged in throughout the program, where they would synthesize and analyze published work in response to a prompt. This knowledge-generation process would often result in challenging previously held assumptions regarding the topic of inquiry through an analysis of authentic data gathered in the field. Many also experience affective dissonance when beliefs about their sense of self as emerging practitioner-researchers are questioned. Some research has examined ways in which to provide deliberate feedback thatattunes not only to the TCs' cognitive and affective dimensions but also to where they can be moved in terms of the outer limits of their learning potential. This study examines how the lenses of socio-cultural and constructive-developmental theories can complement TEs in supporting their TCs in navigating the complex task of teacher research and proposes a framework for feedback practice grounded in a person-centered approach that accounts for TC developmental potentialities.