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focus is on teacher education that enables teachers to grow and renew aspects of
their teaching work in order to better respond to the needs of their learners, whether
those learners be fellow teachers or students. The notion of mentoring as ongoing
teacher education points to an expansion of the mentoring space, beyond practices
associated with feedback to the mentee and also to the inclusion of other actors in
this space. It also implies an expansion of the notion of teacher educator to include
school-based as well as university-based teacher educators in a collaborative
endeavour aimed at ongoing teacher education for all those involved in the enter-
prise of education.
Mentoring in educational settings during the professional experience component
of initial teacher education can involve a variety of participants in the mentoring
space. Such educational settings range from early childhood centres through to sec-
ondary schools and may also include students with both short- and long-term spe-
cial needs, for example, intensive English centres. Experienced teachers and leaders,
preservice and beginning teachers and university-based teacher educators may
engage in this space in generative relationships focused on contextualised learning
about teaching work. A collaborative space between university and the educational
settings (Le Cornu, 2015 ), both inside and outside classrooms, offers the potential
for sharing in relationships that are more equal and democratic in their acknowl-
edgement of what each party brings to the relationship. Within the mentoring rela-
tionship, mentor and mentee may share philosophies of practice along with technical
skills and professional and personal support simultaneous with challenge and exper-
imentation. Such relationships can serve as a stepping stone to the elusive ‘com-
munity of practice’ (Hord & Sommers, 2008 ; Lave & Wenger, 1991 ) and can make
an important contribution to professional learning that leads to changes in the cul-
ture of the educational setting when the mentoring is focused on transforming
teaching work. It is in this collaborative space that the quality of conversations
(Coombs & Goodwin, 2013 ; Timperley, 2001 ) can open up or shut down the learn-
ing resulting from mentoring work. The vignette offered later in this chapter illus-
trates one case of how such collaboration between school-based and university-based
teacher educators resulted in transformative learning for those involved.
From Support to Supervision
The space of mentoring has been dramatically altered by the introduction of profes-
sional teaching standards in Australia (AITSL, 2012 ) and elsewhere, which seek to
describe and mandate the actions of both mentees and mentors for the purpose of
teacher accreditation. The processes of accreditation and registration of teachers
against such standards can serve to entrench a ‘supervisory’ model of mentoring
focused on the documentation of a mentee’s performance using ‘specialist dis-
courses of ...professional standards’ (Kemmis et al., 2014 , p. 159) for the purposes
of compliance. In the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL 2012 ),
the actions associated with mentoring are described in the standards for ‘Highly
D. Ta lbot