Mentoring in the North: New provision, new perspectives?

This paper offers a new perspective on early professional development in the one-year PGDE (Professional Graduate Diploma in Education) course, exploring the potential of threshold concepts (troublesome knowledge) in clarifying the process of learning to teach for both experienced and recently appointed university tutors, and their student teachers. The key mentoring role of tutors in inducting graduates from different disciplines into the values and indeterminacies of teaching and learning may be hampered by the current listing of 'benchmarks' of performance, which can sometimes encourage a mechanistic or even inauthentic approach to the assessment of school experience, particularly by inexperienced tutors. Here we explore different tutors' perceptions of an alternative framework, derived from the classroom experience of probationers, that focuses on breakthrough moments for beginning teachers.