The Mentoring Process in Pre‐service Teacher Education

Mentoring currently plays an important role in the professional development of both trainee and newly qualified teachers. However, despite the prominence given to this in the delivery of programmes of teacher education and the associated literature there is as yet no consensus as to how it is best managed nor, indeed, that it should be done so in a way that can be universally applied to different schemes. In order to give an overview of the current state of the art this paper considers mentoring and its associated dimensions using the literature to inform the various aspects of the mentoring process: selection of mentors; preparation of mentors for the task; mentor‐student interaction; sustaining the mentoring role; assessment and mentoring in context.