97educators in all educational settings to work together on mentoring practices. Such
approaches are mindful that good mentoring is differentiated to meet the specific
needs of the mentee (Schwille, 2008 ) and are sensitive to context (Devos, 2010 ;
Kline, White, & Lock, 2013 ). To this end, some mentoring courses are coupled with
opportunities for practitioner inquiry as not only an authentic means to connect
practice to context (Timperley, 2001 ; Talbot et al., 2017 ) but as an educative inter-
vention in which mentor and mentee explore teaching and learning practice together.
Traditionally however, the roles of mentor and mentee, whether that is between
university-based educators and teachers or experienced teachers and beginning or
preservice teachers, are fixed in their designation for a given period of time and thus
incorporate certain relationships of power in terms of knowledge and expertise
(Aspfors & Fransson, 2015 ; Orland-Barak, 2014 ). Such fixed power relationships
can work against the development of collaborative relationships that contribute to
the learning of both mentor and mentee, but this need not be the case. Taking the
case of learning how to teach literacy, Comber ( 2006 ) explains how experienced
classroom practitioners and beginning teachers with up-to-date theoretical knowl-
edge of literacy teaching practice worked together as co-researchers in mentor-
mentee relationships that were temporally flexible. What Comber illustrates in this
research is supportive of the claim that mentor-mentee relationships work well
when there is an acknowledgement at the outset that one participant cannot always
be the ‘expert’ and the other always the ‘novice’.
Mentoring is a relational practice that relies heavily on conversations for learning
between mentor and mentee. Learning to be a good mentor, therefore, should
include opportunities to develop skills for conducting mentoring conversations,
including online opportunities (Coombs & Goodwin, 2013 ; Schwille, 2008 ;
Timperley, 2001 ). Mentoring conversations, however, also vary in their quality and
usefulness to the purpose of transforming practice. When mentoring conversations
are limited to the mentor advising the mentee what they themselves would have
done in a similar situation, they fail to acknowledge the mentee’s teaching philoso-
phy that gave rise to their actions that may indeed be different from the mentor’s
own. When mentoring conversations avoid analysis and problem-solving directed
towards difficult situations that have arisen in some aspect of the mentee’s practice,
they fail to assist the mentee in transforming their practice. Timperley ( 2001 ) posits
that a quality mentoring conversation should begin with the mentor articulating an
area of concern and finding out whether the mentee shares the concern. This gives
the mentee time and a space in which they might explain the underlying reasons for
and philosophy guiding their actions. Accordingly, the mentor may in turn learn
something about the mentee’s rationale for practice that was not obvious just by
observation.
Such quality conversations, however, require time. The allocation of time to con-
duct such conversations needs to be supported by the educational setting and built
into the processes so it is privileged and preserved, not undertaken when there is five
minutes to spare. In some educational settings, particularly the early childhood sector
where teachers have day-long responsibility for their students, teachers’ anecdotal
comments indicate that time for quality mentoring conversations can be hard to find.
6 Distinguishing Spaces of Mentoring: Mentoring as Praxis