95Accomplished’. In order to gain or maintain accreditation at ‘Highly Accomplished’,
a teacher must engage in accredited professional learning that is designed to meet
these professional standards. Thus, the supervisory model of mentoring and many
of the professional learning programs designed to assist mentor teachers develop
their mentoring practices in line with the use of standards run the risk of normalis-
ing the governing of teacher learning by professional standards (Bloomfield &
Nguyen, 2015 ; Devos, 2010 ) in line with accountability agendas. The focus of the
actions associated with mentoring shifts from support for the immediacy of teach-
ers’ work at the frontline to a text-based process of compliance and accountability
as teachers produce portfolios of evidence designed to demonstrate that they have
met these standards. Such a process assumes that all mentees in all contexts have the
same learning needs. Mentor teachers do not have the flexibility to produce a rich
and extensive portfolio of evidence that demonstrates how they have responded to
the differentiated learning needs of their mentee if such mentoring meets too few of
the standards. Policymakers thus become important actors in this mentoring space
as they seek to govern teachers’ work and learning from a distance (Smith, 2006 ;
Talbot, 2015 ) through processes that influence both the design and accreditation of
professional learning.
The historical model of ‘supportive’ mentoring, which includes a focus on the
mentee’s professional and personal well-being (Ambrosetti, Knight, & Dekkers,
2014 ), may be supplanted by a more bureaucratic and supervisory attention to
checklists of standard statements and reduced to ‘coaching’, which is much more
focused on the acquisition of technical skills (Kennedy, 2005 ). Lesson observation
schedules, supplied by many universities for the purposes of mentoring preservice
teachers, routinely include lists of professional teaching standards that the supervis-
ing teacher is required to check against, thus focusing the supervising teachers’
attention on technical descriptors of practice. Incidentally, professional standards
are not the only factor that has contributed to a ‘supervisory’ model of mentoring,
particularly of preservice teachers. It has long been part of professional experience
practice in most universities that either the supervising teacher or the tertiary mentor
is responsible for writing the evaluative final report that determines the preservice
teacher’s fate as either a ‘classroom-ready’ teacher, or not.
If accountability agendas, operationalised by professional standards, support and
entrench supervisory models of mentoring, I ask what, if anything, can be done to
move towards mentoring as a democratic practice or praxis? How might university
mentors and mentors in other educational settings learn to improve their mentoring
practices without succumbing to the dangers of ‘institutional capture’ (Smith, 2005 ,
p. 156) whereby they become complicit in supporting the accountability regime that
governs their practice in restrictive ways? How do mentors learn to resist mentoring
that attempts to create a ‘mini-me’ – the mentor expects the mentee to emulate their
practice – and enter into more equal learning relationships with their mentee?
Recent research around teacher professional learning and mentoring practices has
sought to engage with such questions and to build something of a foundation for
envisioning mentoring in ways that offer a space of resistance to models focused on
6 Distinguishing Spaces of Mentoring: Mentoring as Praxis