A global phenomen is that an increasing number of teachers leave the teaching profession, which is particularly common among newly qualified teachers. Research shows that a better induction of new teachers and mentoring programs can reduce this trend (Smith, T. M. & Ingersoll, R. M. 2004, Strong, M., Villar, A. & Fletcher, S. 2008, Kemmis et al., 2014). Praxis in the teaching profession is that new teachers immediately after their training are expected to carry full legal and pedagogical responsibility for their assignments. The teaching profession has sometimes been characterized as a "tableland" profession, which means that the responsibility is comprehensive and demanding right from the start, but it does not grow to any great extent during their professional life unless the teacher is changing duties (Aspfors & Hansen, 2011). Without support, new teachers can suffer from a so-called “reality shock” when they encounter unexpected operational events (Carlgren and Marton, 2002). Mentoring can assist new teachers to position themselves within a school community and help them to handle the initial difficulties and challenges of the profession (Fransson & Gustafsson 2012).

In March 2011, the Swedish parliament decided to introduce a teacher certification. This meant that teachers and preschool teachers who were completing their education after July 1, 2011 had to participate in a one-year introduction program with mentor support before they could get their certification. The ambition was to raise the profession's status and increase the recruitment. The mentors, in the teachers certificate program, were appointed by the principals. The mentors were qualified teachers or preschool teachers with at least a few years’ experience. The principal would be overall responsible for the induction period. Another purpose of an introductory period with mentor support was to create a bridge between teacher education and professional life (National Agency of Education, 2012).

Before the reform in 2011, there were no common structured forms of mentoring in Sweden. It was the principal’s responsibility to decide how to introduce new teachers. In 2013, OECD performed a study Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in which Sweden was included. The participation in introduction program at the first teaching job among Swedish teacher’s was lower than the average in the TALIS survey. Furthermore, Sweden is worst off among TALIS countries in terms of the percentage of principals indicating that the mentoring program is available to all teachers at their schools (TALIS 2013).

Kemmis with colleagues (2014b) examined practices of mentoring within and between Australia, Finland and Sweden. They drew on a variety of studies and, demonstrated three archetypes of mentoring; supervision, support and collaborative self-development. They found that mentoring in Sweden mainly followed classical arrangement. The archetype ‘mentoring as support’ in which a mentor; a more experienced teacher works individually with a mentee, supporting the new teacher in the development of his or her professional practices.
Conferring to the results in the TALIS survey and Kemmis et.al. (2014b) results our aim with this study is to mentors’ perceptions of mentoring in Swedish pre-schools. Our question is: in what different ways do Swedish pree-school mentors perceive their mentoring as supportive?

According to Kemmis’ et al. (2014a) practice theory; practices are constituted within specific conditions and arrangements that are called practice architectures. These practice architectures anticipate people’s practices and they change when conditions are changed. They are concrete and detailed, not abstract entities. We understand a mentoring practice as “a form of socially established cooperative human activity that involves characteristic forms of understanding (sayings), modes of actions (doings), and ways in which people relate to one another and the world (relatings)” (Kemmis et al. 2014a, p. 155).

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