In this article we offer an extended reading of an action research model in the context of mentored learning in preservice education in Israel. Our reading attends both to how a particular form of action research plays out in participants' constructions of the practice of mentoring and mentored learning and how such constructions can be understood in the wider context of interrelations between activity systems, as offered through the lens of activity theory. Such an embedded reading can illuminate on the gaps and contradictions between different educational practices, directing participants' processes and outcomes of learning, as they actively transform their practice while trying to mediate between these contradictions.