131mentorship communities. For example, the implementation of professional stan-
dards (AITSL, 2011 ) led to a redesign of aspects of our mentor training. These
standards have a focus upon the more technical aspects of teaching. Despite this, the
standards and the regulation around them can be viewed as an opportunity to pro-
vide both structure and motivation for critical engagement and conversations that
raise the quality of praxis.
Summary and Conclusions
This chapter has described some of the key issues involved in fostering a high qual-
ity of praxis within online mentoring. It has argued for embracing a broad under-
standing of mentorship, one that includes online mentoring as well as group and
peer mentoring. It has defined mentoring as occurring within formally convened
dialogic communities of teachers and has identified the design of mentorship pro-
grams as an opportunity to raise the quality of praxis of teachers. Typically, it is
teacher educators who mentor preservice teachers and either bureaucracies or teach-
ers within schools who design mentorship programs for beginning teachers. We
have argued that the designers of mentorship programs have an opportunity to raise
the quality of praxis of the teachers involved. There is an opportunity to support
praxis when designing online spaces within which the mentorship community inter-
acts when planning the membership of the community and when planning for train-
ing of mentors within the community.
Fig. 8.2 Mentor relationships within TeachConnect: mentorship circles, one-to-one relationships
and a circle of mentors
8 Raising the Quality of Praxis in Online Mentoring