Conference Agenda

Teacher shortages continue unabated in many countries across the globe. Beginning teachers entering the profession during a time of intersecting global crises face multiple, unprecedented challenges that threaten their development as teachers and impact their decisions to leave the profession, thus exacerbating teacher shortages. Mentoring of beginning teachers by more experienced teachers has long been identified as a way of assisting beginning teachers to transition successfully into the profession. However, being an experienced teacher does not automatically translate to becoming an effective mentor (Betlem et al., 2019; Lofthouse, 2018)..Hobson (2016) suggests that mentor preparation programs include developing effective communication skills for working with adult learners, navigating difficult conversations with mentees (Hudson and Hudson, 2010), provision of emotional support, scaffolding critical reflection on teaching and learning, and providing mentees with appropriate levels of challenge to facilitate growth as autonomous professionals. While specialist mentor training is central to effective mentoring, often teachers are assigned to mentoring roles with little or no specific training (Parker et al., 2021). .It is argued that the need for mentor training is particularly salient now to enable beginning teachers to further develop their skills and competences required for teaching in a polycrisis world.

The mentor training program that provides the context for this paper was developed in response to national and state reviews of teacher education in Australia, the UK and Sweden, that call for beginning teachers to be supported by specialist trained mentors.The largest teacher employing authority in one state in Australia invested huge fiscal and human resources with the investement intended to support and sustain the mentor training and the enactment of mentoring in schools Monetary equivalent was provided to schools for up to 72 hours per year of release time from class for each beginning teacher with each school principal having the autonomy to decide how the funding would be allocated and used.

The mentor training program was developed and delivered by a team of teacher educators from a local university awarded the tender to complete the work. The program ran for six years across the state and comprised two days of face to face training for experienced teachers nominated by their principals to develop their mentoring skills and capacities. As mentoring was positioned in the training program as supportive rather than supervisory or evaluative, teachers in formal leadership roles (such as deputy principals or principals) were intentionally excluded from participating in the mentor training.The expectation was that on completion of the mentor training program, mentors would return to their schools and lead the implementation of mentoring in their particular contexts. Due to the huge input of monetary and other resources, and given that the program was a system-wide initiative that ran for an extended period of time, we wanted to investigate the extent to which mentoring was implemented and sustained in schools following cessation of the program. An activity system framework was used as a theoretical lens through which to examine the contradictions that impacted on the equitable implementation of mentoring across school settings post-participation in the mentor training program. The paper addresses the research question: What are the enablers and constraints that impacted on implementing and sustaining mentoring in schools post-mentor training?.

While the mentor training program was a system-led and system-wide initiative, the findings revealed disparities in the implementation of mentoring in schools across the sector and were often dependent on the leadership in the schools. This paper describes how contradictions contributed as obstacles in ensuring equitable mentoring across school contexts and offers several key recommendations to strengthen the impact of systemic wide initiatives such as mentor training programs for teachers.

Mentors occupy a crucial yet often under-theorised position within the continuum of teacher professional development (Behr, 2017). In many systems, they act simultaneously as teachers and as teacher educators. This dual professional location requires mentors to navigate a distinct set of expectations, practices, and forms of knowledge that differ from the routines of classroom teaching. The transition from being a teacher of children to becoming a mentor of teachers is therefore not a self-evident or automatic extension of one’s teaching practice. As Orland-Barak (2010) argues, “learning to mentor [is] learning a second language of teaching” (p. 53). She further emphasises that the passage from being a teacher of children to becoming a mentor of teachers “does not occur naturally. Rather […] it is a highly conscious and gradual process of reorganising and reconstructing beliefs and understandings that the novice mentor holds as a teacher in order to make sense of the new context of mentoring” (p. 53).

Recent research increasingly questions deficit-oriented assumptions that position new teachers primarily as lacking and in need of remediation. Skytterstad et al. (2025) show that induction arrangements often reproduce deficit discourses that cast beginning teachers as survivors, thereby narrowing their scope for agency and subjectification. Yet their study demonstrates that induction can also be enacted through an opportunity-oriented perspective that recognises new teachers as co-producers of practice rather than deficient apprentices (Skytterstad et al., 2025). Within such reframings, mentors become key actors: they can either reinforce survival narratives or deliberately cultivate practice architectures that enable collaborative learning, innovation, and mutual growth.

Despite the growing recognition that mentoring constitutes a specialised professional practice, mentors are often selected primarily based on teaching experience and seniority (Zeilinger & Dammerer, 2022). Such selection criteria risk reducing mentoring to the transmission of accumulated experience, neglecting the dialogic, reflective, and interpretative dimensions that define high-quality support for beginning teachers (Kraler & Schreiner, 2022). Research shows that effective mentors must be able to articulate teaching rationales, provide constructive and evidence-based feedback, and facilitate joint reflection on both visible and tacit aspects of teaching (Carmi & Tamir, 2023; Ellis et al., 2020).

Various frameworks articulate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for high-quality mentoring (Alonzo et al., 2025; Clarke et al., 2014; Hobson et al., 2009; Keller-Schneider, 2020a, 2020b, 2022). Yet comparatively little is known about how mentors themselves conceptualise their professional identity and role. This gap is particularly relevant in European contexts, where induction and mentoring practices vary widely. Austria constitutes a noteworthy case in point. Here, mentors can – among other forms of qualification – complete a specialised Master’s degree (120 ECTS) in mentoring, which provides a systematic, research-informed professionalisation that extends well beyond short-course qualification models. Such programmes offer structured opportunities to develop a meta-perspective on teaching, mentoring, and professional learning, raising expectations that mentors with this background tend to articulate a more differentiated understanding of their role.

This paper addresses the following research question: How do Master-qualified mentors, drawing on both formal preparation and practical mentoring experience, articulate their professional self-understanding in navigating the tension between teaching and mentoring? The focus is on the beliefs, assumptions, and role conceptions mentors mobilise when supporting beginning teachers in the induction phase. By analysing mentors’ own accounts, the study explores mentoring as a lived professional practice situated within the broader ecology of teacher induction.

By foregrounding mentors’ own perspectives, this study contributes to debates on professional practices in the induction of new teachers. It offers a nuanced account of how mentoring is conceptualised from within by professionally qualified mentors and highlights the implications for cultivating robust induction ecologies in European contexts.

Abstract
Mentoring is internationally regarded as a key professionalization strategy for supporting novice teachers during their transition into autonomous professional practice. In Austria, mentoring has not only become established as a supportive practice but is increasingly differentiated as an independent field within professional teacher education (Dammerer et al., 2020). This development brings into focus the question of how mentors themselves are professionalized and how qualification pathways extending up to Master’s level enable them to develop into significant teacher educators.

This paper examines these developments by analyzing the curricula of higher education programs for mentor education up to Master’s level at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria. The curricula conceptualize mentoring as a demanding pedagogical and andragogical practice that extends far beyond collegial support. Mentors are expected to establish supportive relationships with mentees and to accompany them in their development into competent and reflective practitioners. At the same time, the programs promote an expanded understanding of the mentor role, enabling graduates to apply their expertise not only as mentors but also as educational professionals, leaders, quality consultants, facilitators of organizational development, or adult educators.

From a theoretical perspective, this form of mentor education can be conceptualized as professionalization within a tension field encompassing professional knowledge, skills, dispositions, and organizational impact (Zeilinger & Dammerer, 2024). The curricula explicitly draw on multiple domains of professional capability, including professional identity and professionalism; teaching and learning; communication and interaction; mentoring, accompaniment, and counselling; as well as organizational development, human resource development, and research competence.

Mentoring is thus understood as a multidimensional professional practice that addresses both the individual learning processes of mentees – such as lesson planning, enactment, reflection, and evaluation – and the systemic demands of the school as an organization.

A particularly salient feature of the programs is their research-based yet practice-oriented design (Ziegler et al., 2025). Participating teachers are expected to reflect on their professional biographies, further develop their professional agency, and cultivate mentoring as a reflective, dialogical, and at the same time evaluative practice. The aim of developing developmental profiles across induction phases points to advanced observation and assessment competence, positioning mentors as key actors in school-based quality assurance processes.

Didactically, this professionalization pathway is structured around five guiding principles: professionalism (with case-based work and self-reflection as points of departure), diversity and inclusion (as a mandatory cross-cutting theme), inquiry-based learning and reflection (fostering an inquiry stance), co-teaching (as a didactic principle of inclusive teaching), and a culture of feedback (including self-evaluation, external evaluation, and feedback strategies).

Mentor education is therefore not conceptualized as mere competence acquisition but as the development of a reflective professional stance within social learning architectures such as learning communities, peer teams, and critical friendship.

Against this background, mentor education up to Master’s level emerges as a distinct pathway of professionalization in which teachers do not merely assume additional functions but constitute themselves as teacher educators – through advanced professional knowledge, research-oriented reflection on practice, mentoring and counselling competence, and the capacity to initiate and support school development processes.