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the Mentoring Beginning Teachers program and others through the Mentoring for
Effective Teaching program, as well as internationally in Hong Kong, the Philippines
and the United States. The five traits that are expected of mentors are listed in the
Hudson model as (a) the ability to introduce mentees to the requirements of the
educational system, (b) the ability to share pedagogical knowledge with mentees,
(c) the ability to model teaching practice for the mentee, (d) the ability to provide
feedback to the mentee and (e) the possession of personal attributes by the mentor.
These concepts have a firm basis in the literature as types of knowledge important
to preservice and beginning teachers (Barrera et al., 2010 ; Clark & Byrnes, 2012 ;
Hobson et al., 2009 ). Each of the activities involved in the five factors will be briefly
described as both a technical ability and a basis for critical dialogue that brings into
question the underpinning values and beliefs of the mentee.
It is expected that mentors can teach system requirements to mentees. A teacher
is embedded within many systems and must learn to navigate the rules and social
norms of many of these systems simultaneously. A preservice or beginning teacher
discovers that there are expectations of them that exist at the level of the classroom,
the educational setting, the broader community of teachers, the state or independent
teaching system that they are a part of, the national teaching system and the profes-
sion. All this is filtered by the individual understanding that the teacher has of those
systems (Jakobsdóttir, McKeown, & Hoven, 2009 ). Each has its own obligations, be
they enforced, encouraged, assumed, cultural or moral. A preservice or beginning
teacher needs to learn how to function within these different systems and that a
mentor can support the mentee to negotiate them, for example, working with the
preservice or beginning teacher to develop teaching outcomes that are coherent with
the learning frameworks, national quality standards or curriculum documents,
developing an understanding of policy and codes of conduct and taking part in the
curriculum planning with other teachers (P. Hudson & Millwater, 2008 ). A praxis-
based understanding of these activities is that the mentee has a role to play in shap-
ing these systems – by moving beyond the essential skills of survival and focussing
on nurturing the mentee’s critical facility to engage with the systems in which they
find themselves – helping them to recognise the activity systems of which they are
a part. For example, it is a frequent refrain within the teaching profession that the
administrative and bureaucratic obligations of accountability within the various sys-
tems can prevent a teacher from having the time to plan and deliver effective teach-
ing programs (Fenech & Sumsion, 2007 ; Groundwater-Smith & Mockler, 2009 ).
Mentoring is an opportunity for teachers to critically engage with all of these sys-
tems within which they are embedded, asking questions such as why is there often
a gap between educational theory and the range of pedagogical practices used in the
school? How do curricula come to be developed? What are the ethics of practising
as a teacher embedded within so many (potentially conflicting) systems?
We recognise the implicit hierarchy of needs in Hudson’s second element of the
five factor model and that preservice and beginning teachers must learn to survive if
they are to be transformational – yet Freire’s critical pedagogy can be used to sug-
gest perhaps these two need not be separated. Just as a teacher can teach a child to
become literate either with or without teaching them that literacy is a powerful tool
N. Kelly et al.