My research activities lie in the areas of mentoring and the development of expertise, learning by professionals and learning in the workplace in educational contexts. Drawing on socio-cultural perspectives on professional learning, I focus on how the workplace context mediates the learning of novice teachers and mentors in diverse educational settings. I intend to continue the above lines of research with an eye toward extending the systematic study of professional learning and education
across professions and academic domains.

The outburst of COVID-19 has drawn a lot of attention to blended space learning and teaching practices and calls for identifying spheres of expert teacher knowledge in the digital teaching space and the subsequent development of a clinical blended practice teaching model. With these challenges in mind,
I am currently engaged in two exciting research studies:

Mentoring and Teacher Learning in the Blended Practice Teaching Space (2020 -2022)

FUNDED BY THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

Since the outburst of COVID 19 , and in collaboration with Dr. Ron Blonder from the Weitzman Institute of Science, Dr. Alona Forkush from Lewinsky College of Education and Dr. Alexandra Saad for the University of Haifa , we are leading a three stage large-scale mixed method study aimed at (1) identifying and describing the knowledge domains that expert teachers developed during the transitioning to the digital teaching space and (2) on the basis of the findings from the first stage, to propose a model of teacher learning in the blended practice teaching space.

The study aims at shedding light on the domains of knowledge that need to be developed in teacher education for learning to teach and for mentoring in the blended practice teaching space. As such, it establishes new and meaningful links between research, policy and practice through the development of a clinical blended practice teaching model that is researched, implemented and evaluated in diverse teacher education contexts throughout the country.

Mentoring “on the line”: Adaptive expertise practices of mentors working on-line in public Arab schools

I am conducting a comprehensive on-going mixed methods study in collaboration with Dr. Alexandra Saad at the University of Haifa, to explore how Arab mentors in teacher education institutions in Israel developed and enacted adaptive expertise practices to manage the passage to on-line mentoring brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Combining conceptualizations and empirical work on adaptive expertise with cultural theory, we investigate the ways in which mentors adapted their roles and practices to manage the challenges brought about by the new teaching and mentoring reality.