New title: Mentoring of Newly Qualified Teachers: Norwegian policy intentions and implications for school leadership

Mentoring of newly qualified teachers is considered an essential measure to help newly qualified teachers in the transition between education and profession and to ensure newly qualified teacher retention. Following this acknowledgement, policy intentions regarding mentoring newly qualified teachers becomes central in educational policy. However, the implications for school leaders’ practice has not been adequately discussed. School leaders are responsible for organizing mentoring of newly qualified teachers, so this is an issue that needs to be properly addressed: The purpose of the presentation is to give insight into how intentions regarding mentoring of newly qualified teachers are defined, legitimized and turned into expectations with implications for school leadership. The phenomenon is studied with an example from a Norwegian context. Norway is an interesting case, because the attention to leadership and mentoring has been extensive the past decade. Four relevant policy documents have been selected and made subject to content analysis to illuminate the following research question: What ideas and expectations about mentoring of newly qualified teachers, and the organization of these, are present in policy documents concerning mentoring of newly qualified teachers?  A neo-institutional perspective is applied for the purpose of the analysis, and the study is grounded in theories of mentoring and leadership. More specifically, Discursive Institutionalism is applied to highlight prevailing ideas and expectations, regarding the organization of mentoring newly qualified teachers, represented in the documents. A distributed perspective on leadership is applied.

In this paper the methodological approach is document analysis. The many policy documents in Norway, which put mentoring on the agenda, make it important to analyse a selection of those to identify what ideas and expectations about mentoring beginning teachers that are expressed, and investigate what the implications for leadership practice are. This article examines two White Papers (WP) and two Strategy Documents published over the last 12 years. These documents were selected because they directly promote the focus on mentoring newly qualified teachers. The text in these documents reflect ideas and expectations from actors of governance directed towards mentoring newly qualified teachers and the leadership aspect of this. Discursive Institutionalism is applied as an analytical lense in order to get a hold of prevailing ideas and how they are communicated in the texts. The first reading is aimed to obtain a holistic overview of the messages of the texts to determine which ideas and expectations about mentoring were prominent. It involves coding of pieces of the texts that are relevant according to the theoretical approach. NVivo software is used as a tool in this process. The second reading is aimed to identify arenas and actors central in conveying and receiving identified ideas, and particularly look for implications for leadership. The third reading aimed to document multiple and competing ideas.

Three main findings are highlighted: 1) Mentoring is seen as a feature in “career long learning” for teachers, and mentoring newly qualified teachers is described as an inherent part of the professional development in schools. Mentoring newly qualified teachers and other measures for professional development are suggested to be organized as interconnected in order to maintain the school as a learning organization. 2) Mentors and school leaders are seen as responsible for professional development through mentoring newly qualified teachers, and are suggested different mandates in this respect. 3)The interconnectedness of measures for professional development is expressed to have implications for the wider collaborations schools have with other institutions such as e.g. teacher education institutions and school authorities. The documents directly address the responsibility of the parties to facilitate these collaborations. The selected policy documents represent ideas and expectations about mentoring newly qualified teachers in all schools in Norway. However, signals about how the measures should be carried out are vague, particularly in terms of leadership. It is left to the practitioners to operationalise the policy intentions, and this may represent challenges for leadership. Leadership is addressed in a broad and general manner, not directed to leadership on specific institutional levels. Ideas about mentoring practice is more concrete. This points to the translation challenges that arise when a reform initiative is introduced in schools. The process from initiative to enactment is both long and complicated and may contain tensions between actors like school leaders, mentors and newly qualified teachers.

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