This article describes a collaborative mentoring program in which graduate students (fellows) from a university atmospheric science research department team-taught environmental science classes with professors in a liberal arts college. The mentorship allowed fellows to develop and test the effectiveness of curriculum based on the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) approach. Qualitative analysis of narratives from four fellows who completed the mentoring program in an upper-level undergraduate atmospheric science class was used to develop three hypotheses about approaches to mentoring and teaching: (1) a constructivist-motivated approach to mentoring effectively allows graduate fellows to learn about constructivist-motivated pedagogy, (2) graduate fellows learn to formulate hypotheses related to the scholarship of teaching and learning by reflecting on their development and use of pedagogical innovations, and (3) the development and use of POGIL assignments and associated classroom pedagogy promotes graduate students' understanding of cognitive and social constructivist principles. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)