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Purpose: This in-depth case study examined the mentor's role in mediating a culturally diverse community of student teachers-as-learners in the context of practice teaching in university teacher education in Israel. Specifically, it explored how the mentor's response to cultural aspects of learning to teach shaped the group's learning environment. Design/methodology/approach: Data collection included 23 video-recorded meetings of the learning community and semi-structured interviews with all four participants. Findings: Findings proposed six actions of the mentor that aimed at promoting an empathetic and supportive learning environment that encouraged collaborative talk around culturally diverse issues that surfaced during practice teaching. Implications for teacher education programs are presented and discussed. Practical implications: The study offers a practical framework of tools (or mentor actions) that can help mentors to promote social interactions in culturally diverse mentoring conversational settings. Originality/value: The study identified six actions that can serve as tools in mediating sensitive discourse to issues of diversity in communities of culturally diverse learners.

The research question studied in this paper is how teachers' task designing can be enhanced in professional development. We show that this can be done by scaffolding. Scaffolding is used in problem solving and we apply it by considering designing a task as a problem. In the paper, we describe a professional development of four teachers led by a mathematics educator. The professional development consisted of 10 meetings. The teachers were first exposed to a well-designed task in geometry as learners and then were asked to design new geometry tasks for their students. The mathematics educator helped them by supplying scaffolds such as modelling, reflection, articulation and worked examples. The data consisted of video-recordings of the workshops and a semi-structured interview with each of the teachers at the end of the project. The data analysis shows how the use of particular scaffolds was helpful while preserving the teachers' autonomy as task designers.