From Noticing Differences to Professional Growth: A Staged Developmental Process in Cross-Regional Teacher Mentoring

The digital transformation of education has created new opportunities for the professional development of rural teachers. While artificial intelligence (AI) can be integrated into teacher training programs, sustainable teacher growth emerges from the synergy between AI-enabled support and human experts’ contextual expertise. This study draws on the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) to construct a cross-regional mentor-mentee interconnected framework. Using epistemic network analysis (ENA), it examines data from three rounds of online one-on-one sessions involving 15 mentor-mentee teacher pairs. Results reveal that expert-novice noticing differences can trigger a staged developmental process in which novice teachers progress from recognizing these differences to systematically reconstructing their professional identity. Finally, it proposes strategies to promote authentic, trust-based dialogic negotiation between mentors and mentees, emphasizing the role of mutual respect in sustaining meaningful professional learning relationships.