Aim of study:

• to explore collaborative mentoring and the role of formative assessment within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) with the aim of offering a contribution to further understanding the intricacies of the mentoring process.

The importance of the mentoring process within the realms of beginner teachers is a recurring theme within the literature on teacher education.  The current prevailing discourse of a ‘knowledge society’ and its emphasis on lifelong learning suggests that the processes of learning and teaching are significant, and necessitates changes to the way teaching is conceptualised:  wider and more complex knowledge, skill and competences bases are required (Grabinger, Dunlap and Duffield, 1997).  Such a discourse means that the process of learning is a central component and ‘teaching is the core profession, the key change agent of change’(Hargreaves, 2003:125).  This has implications for the nature and quality of the future generation of teachers in terms of the attributes necessary to develop appropriate capacities in learners and the mentoring practices used to foster such attributes.  This is a problematic task (Davies and Dunnill, 2008) that requires appropriate, considered responses.  Within the context of initial teacher education and salient discourses of professionalism, this paper considers the role of formative assessment principles and practices within a collaborative mentoring process as one response to the need for the development of these attributes.  Current Scottish education policy is used to frame and exemplify points made with respect to development of mentoring processes and their relationship to formative assessment.  However, applicability of this analysis goes wider than Scotland, recognizing the tendency in education for policy to ‘travel’ (Ozga and Jones, 2006).

Collaborative mentoring practices are underpinned by a constructivist epistemological basis.  This is evident in educational research literature both on mentoring beginner teachers and that of formative assessment (for example, Hawkey, 1998; Graham, 1999; Mullen, 2000; Stanulis and Russell, 2000; Ritchie, Rigano and Lowry, 2000; Wang, 2002; Harrison et al., 2005; Rosenblatt, 1979 as cited in Hargreaves 2007). As an epistemology constructivism has been defined in a variety of ways (Larochelle, Bedwarz and Garrison, 1998).  In educational contexts the following two conceptions are common and most relevant: cognitive constructivism, where the focus is on individual construction of knowledge, and social constructivism in which knowledge is constructed through interaction with others (Phillips, 2000).  These two conceptions may be combined so that learners actively construct knowledge and understanding both individually and through interactions with others in order to make meaning from experiences where depth of comprehension is key.

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