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.

This study employs a qualitative research design to explore how mentors with advanced, research-based qualifications articulate their professional self-understanding within the induction of new teachers. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten mentors who completed a specialised Master’s degree programme. This targeted selection ensures that participants possess a shared formalised foundation of mentoring knowledge and can articulate their professional practices and beliefs with conceptual precision. Sampling followed the logic of theoretical sampling (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), aiming to maximise the analytical relevance of cases rather than statistical representativeness. Variation across school types, primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, and vocational tracks, was intentionally sought to capture the diversity of institutional contexts and organisational expectations surrounding mentoring. This heterogeneity enables the study to identify commonalities and differences in how mentoring is understood across different educational settings. At the same time, homogeneity regarding the level and nature of mentoring qualification was maintained. This ensures that differences in mentors’ perspectives are not primarily attributable to differences in training levels but instead reflect genuine variation in professional self-understanding. Semi-structured interviews were chosen because they support an exploratory and open-ended inquiry, enabling participants to articulate their beliefs, assumptions, and role conceptions in their own terms without being restricted by predefined theoretical categories. This format allows unexpected themes, individual meaning-making processes, and nuanced interpretations of professional experience to emerge, while still ensuring a sufficient degree of comparability across interviews. The interview guide was therefore broad, flexible, and sensitising rather than prescriptive, inviting mentors to reflect freely on dimensions they considered relevant to their professional self-understanding.

The findings of this study indicate that mentors who have completed a Master’s-level qualification conceptualise mentoring as a distinct professional practice with specific epistemic, relational and reflective demands. While their identity as teachers remains foundational, participants emphasise that mentoring requires additional forms of professional awareness. Mentoring is thus described not as an extension of teaching but as a different mode of professional engagement centred on dialogue, co-reflection and interpretative work. Three overarching conclusions emerge. The first two align with existing research that conceptualises mentoring as a specialised professional practice. First, mentors articulate a professional self-understanding that is explicitly developmental rather than supervisory. They position themselves as facilitators of learning, highlighting trust-building, joint meaning-making and non-evaluative feedback as core elements of their role (Ellis et al., 2020; Kraler & Schreiner, 2022). Second, mentors emphasise the importance of diagnostic and communicative competencies that differ from those typically enacted in classroom teaching. They describe mentoring as requiring heightened attentiveness to tacit pedagogical reasoning, the use of reflective language and the ability to scaffold beginning teachers’ sense-making processes. These demands correspond with international frameworks that frame mentoring as a professional practice in its own right rather than an add-on to teaching (Alonzo et al., 2025; Orland-Barak, 2010; Keller-Schneider, 2022). The third conclusion points to an area for further inquiry. The findings suggest that formalised, research-based education plays a crucial role in expanding mentors’ professional horizons. Participants report that systematic engagement with theory, critical reflection and peer discourse enabled them to reconceptualise their professional role and develop an explicit mentoring identity. European induction systems may therefore benefit from investing in advanced mentor education instead of relying primarily on experience-based selection. Overall, this study underscores the need to recognise mentors as teacher educators and to design induction systems that deliberately cultivate and value their specialised expertise.

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