Discipline specific online mentoring for secondary pre-service teachers

• Participation in online mentoring communities was a positive experience.
• Online community mentoring can occur in open online spaces.
• Mentoring organizer should have initial synchronous contact with the mentees and mentors.
• Develop a network of discipline specialists.
• Online group mentoring leverages several mentors across a greater number of mentees.

This paper describes an online mentoring project which involved building online mentoring learning communities to support secondary pre-service teachers, and to provide them with the opportunity to interact and engage in professional learning dialogue with teaching professionals in their teaching disciplines. The practicing teachers took on the role of online mentors to the pre-service teachers who were personally, professionally and geographically isolated due to being located in regional, rural or remote areas. The goal was to develop discipline specific knowledge, skills and confidence in the pre-service teachers through ongoing electronic interaction with a discipline specific mentor. This paper describes enablers and inhibitors to online mentoring and identifies implications for implementation and suggestions for improvement.