ABSTRACT
Partnership in initial teacher training recognizes that teachers, as mentors, have a critical role to play in the training of new entrants to the profession. However, the fact that you have considerable and invaluable expertise rooted in classroom practice does not mean that you will necessarily find it easy to pass on your skills and knowledge to student teachers. Teaching is a complex craft and this makes learning to teach very demanding. Enabling student teachers to learn from your own practice is challenging, especially if they are to be critical learners and not merely clones. It would be demeaning to the teaching profession to imply that mentoring was easy – simply an extension of your work as a teacher of school pupils.
