Thanks to the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) newly designed EdD programs are developing scholarly practitioners who have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to resolve the problems of practice they are facing. To achieve this, students are taking core courses and, in many programs, completing an internship, or engaging in what G. Stanley Hall called elbow learning. Elbow learning is learning side-by-side from a mentor who has the expertise a student needs. Experiences like these are believed to be beneficial and research has been conducted on them in PhD programs. However to date there has been no research conducted on these experiences in newly designed EdD programs. This study was designed to fill this gap and provide information. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mentors EdD students in a CPED-influenced program chose, why they chose them, what they learned, and what they thought about their experience. Data were gathered from 216 course artifacts written by seventy-two students who were enrolled in the course from 2009 to 2012. A content analysis of artifacts was conducted and revealed a wide-range of mentor choices and students' desires to understand their mentors' thinking and themselves as scholarly practitioners. Students learned explicit and tacit knowledge from their mentors and saw bi-directional gains. From these findings implications are made for program and course designers.