education at the same time as affecting improvement in their own students’
learning. At the same time, a meta-analysis of international scholarship about
mentors and mentoring revealed that for the most part:
[C]o-operating teachers lack specific preparation to enable high quality and developmen-
tally appropriate support for student teachers—they tend to be under-prepared for their
work as mentors. For example, most feedback offered by cooperating teachers is
observation-based feedback and therefore moving beyond reporting on, to inquiring into
practice is unrealized in many practicum settings. (Clarke et al. 2014 , p. 46)This is hardly surprising given that most teachers would tend to prioritize the
learning of their students over the learning of a pre-service teacher and that their
own initial teacher education was focused on student learning and not on their
possible future roles working as adult educators with pre-service teachers. Research
into becoming a teacher educator is an emergingfield. Most of the literature to date
has focused on teachers who move from the classroom and into the university to do
this work. Murray ( 2002 ) notes the shift that occurs from being a classroom teacher
to a teacher educator located in a university as one of becoming a‘second-order
practitioner’. In later work, Murray and Male ( 2005 ) describe second-order prac-
titioners as teacher educators (usually university based)‘who induct their students
into the practices and discourses of both school teaching and teacher education’
(Murray and Male 2005 , p. 126). In this way, they describe schools asfirst order
teaching settings and universities as second order
Where they once worked in thefirst-order setting of the school, they now work in the
second-order setting of Higher Education (HE). (Murray and Male 2005 , p. 126)In our research into school-university partnerships, we note that the same kind of
shift can occur for mentors of pre-service teachers too. Although this professional
group does not change their location, they can nevertheless become‘second order
practitioners’ by working with pre-service teachers alongside university-based
teacher educator colleagues. The additional complexity they face is that they do so
while continuing in their roles asfirst-order practitioners with responsibility for
teaching school students.
In this chapter, we now focus on a particular school-university partnership model
that was designed tofill the mentor professional learning gap through the provision
of university-led professional development of mentors. Now known as Men/tee,
this partnership project was premised on the notion of (re)positioning mentors as
school-based teacher educators, recognizing the important shift through partner-
ships of those who work alongside university-based teacher educators in pre-service
teacher preparation.
In the following sections, we sharefindings regarding Men/tee participants’
professional learning, and then go on to suggest recommendations for future pro-
fessional learning models that encourage the repositioning of mentors in schools as
school-based teacher educators.
19 Supporting Mentoring and Assessment in Practicum Settings... 287