The practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has been known to be troublesome to teachers. (Webb & Tierney, 2020). The authors argue that a mentoring approach based on threshold concepts in SoTL has the potential to lead to more confident conceptual border crossing by new entrants to the SoTL of English communication. A collaborative reflection by a departmental SoTL mentoring partnership was undertaken to identify changes in the mentees' knowledge of scholarship, context-specificity, and the development of expertise. The insights gained point to the efficacy of a knowledge- driven approach to academic mentoring for SoTL scholar development.