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.

Methodology This paper draws on a hermeneutically oriented, reconstructive document analysis of curricula from mentor education programs at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria, examining versions continuously developed from 2013 to the present. Curricula are treated as normative institutional artefacts that condense conceptions of professionalization and construct expectations regarding roles, competences, and learning architectures. The analysis reconstructs how mentoring is legitimized as a professional practice, which subject positions are offered to mentors, and which professionalization and developmental logics are embedded in curricular design. The study aims to identify the meaning structures through which mentors are positioned as teacher educators and to reconstruct the professionalization logics intended to become effective. The analysis is guided by three questions: (1) How is mentoring justified as a professional practice? (2) Which competence and role models are constructed for mentors? (3) Which learning architectures enable the transformation from “experienced teacher” to “teacher educator”? First, mentoring appears as a professional practice characterized by a dual orientation: mentors are expected to advise mentees on teaching and educating while also supporting developmental tasks within the school system. This dual focus is reflected in modules such as Accompanying and Counselling, Teaching and Learning, and Organizational and Human Resource Development, positioning mentors as mediators between individual professional learning and organizational school development. Second, the curricula construct an expanded competence model. Beyond instructional and field-related expertise, strong emphasis is placed on process- and counselling-oriented competences, including coaching, team counselling, collegial consultation, and differentiated case-based work. The developmental trajectory articulated as “from mentoring to leadership” suggests an expectation that mentors increasingly shape and steer learning and development processes within schools. Third, professionalization is framed not as a linear pathway but as a reflective, iterative process. The learning design integrates face-to-face, online, blended, and self-directed formats, and establishes learning communities in which peer leadership, tutor feedback, and critical friendship serve as key quality mechanisms. Research competence emerges as a central driver of professionalization: modules on research methods, research practice, and the master’s module cultivate an inquiry stance grounded in case reconstruction, multiple interpretations, and theoretically justified courses of action. Overall, mentors are positioned as teacher educators who do not merely possess professionalism but actively generate it through relationship building, reflective practice, research engagement, and organizational impact.

Conclusions This paper investigates how mentors in Austria become significant teacher educators through qualification pathways extending up to Master’s level. It takes as its starting point the different variants of mentor education, which conceptualize mentoring as a research-based and practice-oriented format of professionalization. From a theoretical perspective, mentor education is framed as a multidimensional process of professionalization. Mentors act not only as supporters during induction but also as mediators who connect instructional development, counselling, reflection, and organizational school development. The curricula anchor mentoring in key domains such as professional identity and professionalism, teaching and learning, communication, mentoring and counselling, as well as organizational and human resource development. Empirically, a hermeneutic document analysis of curriculum versions shows that mentors are positioned within the programs as professional relationship builders, partners in reflection, and increasingly also as leadership actors. The programs organize professionalization through learning communities, a culture of feedback, co-teaching, and inquiry-based learning and reflection. Research competence is developed not additively but integratively, ranging from philosophy of science and methodology to hermeneutic, qualitative, and quantitative research practice, culminating in a Master’s thesis within the Mentoring Master’s program. Overall, mentor qualification emerges as a structured transformation process in which experienced teachers further develop their practice on a research-informed basis, professionalize their counselling competence, and establish themselves as teacher educators within the school system. In doing so, these programs contribute to the sustainable development of professional practices that support the learning and induction of novice teachers.

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