Mentoring: A practice developed in community?

Behaviourist and cognitive theories of learning view learning as a process of individual internalisation. Social theorists view learning as a process that is socially constructed and developed in social contexts. Wenger suggests that professional practice is a social process that is constructed in communities. Mentoring in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) has been a feature of the ITE landscape since the advent of the internship schemes but might be viewed by many teachers acting as mentors to be a small part of their remit. Some mentors while part of school communities might be seen as discharging their mentoring responsibilities in a relatively isolated manner. This study seeks to develop an understanding of how mentors operating in different phases learn to mentor and to sustain their growth as mentors and to seek to identify how they construct their 'communities of mentoring'.