Teaching practicums offer student teachers authentic opportunities to explore the nature of teaching, apply knowledge developed during their studies, and assess their suitability for the profession prior to formal entry into the workforce.. Time spent in classrooms— working closely with school-based teacher educators (SBTEs) and engaging in supported reflection on teaching experiences—are consistently identified as among the most critical elements of teacher preparation (Andreassen et al., 2019; Clarke et al., 2014). In many countries, student teachers now spend more time in schools during their training than in previous decades (Darling-Hammond, 2017). As a result, the role of SBTEs—who guide teacher candidates’ learning through a dynamic interplay of “showing and telling, asking and listening” (van Ginkel et al., 2016, p. 101)—has become increasingly central to teacher preparation.

Despite their pivotal role, SBTEs—also referred to as cooperating, mentor, or collaborating teachers—remain conceptually underdefined and often contested within teacher education research and practice (Rakes et al., 2023). SBTEs occupy a dual position as both first-order practitioners, responsible for teaching pupils, and second-order practitioners, responsible for educating future teachers (Murray & Male, 2005). This duality generates inherent tensions and may impede the development of a coherent teacher educator identity, which has been shown to be crucial for effectiveness in the role (Andreassen et al., 2019). While prior research has examined how SBTEs are prepared and supported to manage these tensions (Parker et al., 2021), considerably less attention has been paid to how they are recruited. This gap is striking, given that the recruitment of SBTEs—alongside targeted professional learning—has been identified as a key lever for ensuring the quality of future teacher education (Darling-Hammond, 2017; Heikonen et al., 2017).

This study addresses this omission by examining the role of mentoring expertise in the recruitment of SBTEs. The study is situated in Finland, a context internationally recognised for its research-based initial teacher education and long-standing tradition of university-affiliated teacher training schools. In these schools, SBTEs are recruited specifically for positions that combine classroom teaching with the mentoring of student teachers during supervised practicums. Because mentoring is an integral component of the role from the outset, this study asks: What role does mentoring expertise play in the recruitment of school-based teacher educators in Finnish teacher training schools?

By addressing this question, the study contributes to two underdeveloped areas of scholarship: research on teacher recruitment, which remains limited (Klassen & Kim, 2019), and literature on teacher educators, which has “focused primarily on how they perceive themselves as professionals” (Richter et al., 2021, p. 1). By foregrounding employer perspectives, the study deepens understanding of SBTE work and offers insights into recruitment practices that have previously been described as “haphazard” (Parker et al., 2021, p. 66).

To address the research question, the study draws on two complementary data sources: job advertisements for SBTE positions and interviews with the principals responsible for their recruitment. Job advertisements articulate employers’ expectations regarding qualifications, experience, skills, and professional knowledge. Analysing such advertisements is a well-established approach to examining recruitment practices and labour market dynamics (Mahjoub & Kruyen, 2021) and is grounded in document analysis—a systematic method for studying organisational and institutional documents not originally produced for research purposes (Bowen, 2009). To minimise sampling bias, job advertisements were collected from the websites of all seven Finnish universities offering initial teacher education in Finnish. The final dataset consisted of 158 advertisements for SBTE positions in university-affiliated teacher training schools. These documents were analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008), focusing on manifest content in order to remain closely aligned with explicitly stated recruitment criteria rather than inferred meanings. The second data source comprised semi-structured interviews conducted via Zoom with eight principals from teacher training schools affiliated with six universities. All interviewees had been listed as recruitment contact persons in SBTE job advertisements published in 2025 and were approached using the email addresses provided. The interview data were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Following data familiarisation, meaningful units were coded, relationships among codes were examined, and codes were clustered into candidate themes. These themes were iteratively reviewed and refined to enhance internal coherence and analytical clarity, ultimately capturing “the essence of what each theme is about” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 92).

The advertisements presented mentoring expertise and experience vaguely, while principals often described mentoring not as a specialised competence, but as general professional qualities expected of any good teacher, or as something that could be learned on the job—thus not emphasised in recruitment. The findings suggest that the teacher educator role of SBTEs remains subordinate to their role as teachers, as mentoring expertise tended to occupy a secondary position in recruitment compared to requirements related to classroom teaching expertise or pedagogical development. Interestingly, this secondary positioning mirrors trends identified in the recruitment of university teacher educators: in Australia, such positions were primarily framed as generic academic positions, with teacher education responsibilities treated as secondary (Nuttall et al., 2013). This pattern may be explained by the emphasis several principals placed on maintaining a low entry threshold for SBTE positions. Strongly foregrounding mentoring expertise in recruitment was perceived as a potential deterrent to applicants and as a risk of further constraining an already limited candidate pool when compared with municipal teaching positions. However, the resulting marginalisation of mentoring in recruitment practices sits uneasily with the centrality of mentoring in SBTEs’ everyday work in Finland. To better align recruitment with the realities of the role, SBTE selection processes should explicitly acknowledge mentoring expertise alongside classroom teaching experience, beginning with job advertisements and extending throughout the selection process, so that candidates enter the role with a clear understanding of and preparedness for its dual demands.

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