about explicit modeling as a teacher education approach enabled both Carline and
Tim to realize, as Boyd et al. ( 2014 ) note, that pre-service teachers‘may be
blissfully unaware that the teacher educator is modelling’(p. 56). As a conse-
quence, they each developed strategies to draw out and make explicit the intended
learning.
The program’s structural approach of weekly professional learning meetings
between mentors and university-based teacher educators emerged as another sig-
nificant factor in influencing participants’mentoring work. Never before had they
shared their mentoring experiences or had the opportunity to discuss together key
ideas, concepts and strategies. The group quickly began to function as a profes-
sional learning community of reflective practitioners (Wenger 2000 ). As Norman
explains
That interaction and communication with other people.... I remember turning up and
hearing other people’s horror stories thinking“I have no problems, I’m on easy street.”But
there would’ve been times where I thought“oh my god, what am I doing?”So actually not
having a student teacher in isolation to everyone else actually made me think about what
was going on with her and her teaching and our relationship and I became a lot more
self-conscious than what I would’ve been otherwise.Here, Norman acknowledges the value of the mentor community as opposed to the
‘isolation’in which mentoring usually happens. For him, being exposed to the
approaches and strategies of his Men/tee peers pushed Norman’s own thinking
about how to approach his own mentoring work.
Similarly, Paul describes the satisfaction of being able to both offer and receive
advice and suggestions about mentoring as a consequence of working as a part of a
professional learning community of mentors
I thought I was able to contribute to [colleagues’] development, to solving their problems
and I learnt just as much from hearing what other people said about the issues they were
having and how they were resolving it, and yeah, there were some wonderful suggestions
put forward that I think made us all richer for the experience of having that discussion
which we wouldn’t have had otherwise.Paul’s and Norman’sreflections on the positive influence of being part of a pro-
fessional learning community of mentors recall the insights of self-study researchers
who similarly describe the ways in which engaging with others as part of a com-
munity of teacher educators opened up new understandings of how to undertake the
work of teacher education (e.g., Berry and Forgasz 2016 ).
19.6 Implications for Shifting Practice
The Men/tee project was only a small pilot, tested in the context of a single
school-university partnership. Nevertheless, participants’ professional learning
experiences during the program give rise to a number of significant implications for
the future design of school-university partnerships that encourage mentor teachers
294 S. White and R. Forgasz