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The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the evidence base on coaching and mentoring in education, to provide a commentary on literature published in the first 10 volumes of the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (IJMCE) in particular and to offer some directions for future research in the field.

This review and position paper draws on the authors’ knowledge of the extant literature on coaching and mentoring in education, their own research in the field and their perspectives as editors of coaching and mentoring journals.

Among the outcomes of their review and commentary, the authors observe that coaching and mentoring research conducted to date largely occupies two separate fields, and studies published in one field frequently fail to draw on relevant literature from the other or recognise the overlap between them. The authors highlight a number of additional limitations of the evidence base on coaching and mentoring in education and offer some potential means of addressing these.

The paper offers an original reflection on current research into coaching and mentoring in education. It is intended that the paper will inform the design and publication of future studies in this area to strengthen the evidence base and, in turn, inform improvements to coaching and mentoring practice. In particular, the authors hope to encourage the ethical deployment of coaching and mentoring which enhances, rather than inhibits, the well-being of all participants, while realising other positive outcomes.

The high demands that today's young school leavers face in Germany and the increasing recognition of an ageing population with skills and experience to share has led to a rapid increase in mentoring projects where older people work with young school leavers to help them find their way into employment.While this field is still in its infancy, mentoring flourishes in Germany and enjoys enormous public attention.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the complexity that underlies categorizing best practices in the field of mentoring. A further purpose is to propose a way to deal with this issue in order to begin to develop and identify research-based best practices in mentoring in education.

This is a conceptual paper proposing a structure for identifying best practices in mentoring.

The field of mentoring is replete with suggestions about best practices in education, but many are unsubstantiated by empirical research. The authors believe this is due in part to the breath of mentoring resulting in the use of so many different terms, conceptualizations, and applications that it is difficult for practitioners to converse about mentoring and for researchers to synthesize what is already known. They suggest an additional problem is the ambiguity regarding the term best practice. The authors cite these challenges and offer suggests for defining best practices and synthesizing the literature across contexts.

The value of the paper is in the awareness it creates and in the possibilities it presents. By outlining the complex factors related to mentoring best practices, scholars will better understand the constraints that limit our ability to harness all that is known about mentoring best practices. Further, the authors offer a unique way to approach this task, utilizing a collaborative team approach across contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to present a synthesis of the origins and theoretical frameworks of adult mentoring practices in educational and workplace settings along with an analysis and critique of their application to mentoring processes.

The authors systematically analyzed books and articles published in peer-reviewed journals from 1978 to 2012 using qualitative meta-summary and qualitative meta-synthesis methodological approaches.

This systematic review of the literature resulted first, in an organized, historical framework of theories of adult mentoring in academic and workplace and educational contexts from 1978 to 2012. Second, it provided information regarding the recognized challenges in traditional mentoring endeavors that led to the more expansive concept of developmental networks and participation in communities of practice. Third, it served as a foundation for a critique of the theories as applied to mentoring relationships and programs.

The paper provides the theoretical foundation for future empirical work in the field of adult mentoring in educational and workplace settings.

This paper is the first to condense the vast theoretical frameworks that inform the field of adult mentoring in the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the background for, the design of, and the implementation of Lesson Study in a teacher education program in Norway. Lesson Study was chosen as an intervention in an attempt to shift pre-service teachers’ focus from themselves to their pupils, attempting to strengthen their possibilities to learn more about the consequences of their instructional decisions for their pupils.

The study used a time-lagged experiment where one group of second year pre-service teachers took part in their three-week field practice as usual (business-as-usual-condition), and one group, the following year, took part in Lesson Study cycles during their three-week field practice period. The students were recruited from four subject areas in both conditions: Math, Physical Education, Science, and English.

The use of Lesson Study created more collaborative inquiry among the pre-service teachers. At its best, the pre-service teachers formulated research questions, took active part in observations, and used data (pupils’ work, interviews and observations) to inform their choices about how to create improved learning for their pupils.

The study is a small scale study due to the need to test before upscaling.

The paper includes a description of how Lesson Study was implemented in a Teacher Education Department, and this can be valuable information for others who are attempting the same.

This paper fulfills an identified need to learn more about pre-service teachers\ learning and lesson study in teacher education.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how different styles of mentoring in teacher education relate to mentor characteristics. Pre-service teachers often want practical advice. However, in Norway, school mentors have traditionally been encouraged to promote reflection rather than offering advice. This study seeks to explore the relationship between mentors’ support for reflection based and clear mentoring (a relatively direct approach to mentoring) and mentors’ self-efficacy and effort.

Using structural equation modelling of cross-sectional survey data (from 272 school mentors), the researchers in this study tested empirical interrelations between reflection-based mentoring, clear mentoring, mentor efficacy and effort. Clear mentoring was a reasonably consistent construct, while refection-based mentoring was a more elusive concept.

Effort was associated with support for reflection, while self-efficacy was moderately related to clear mentoring and reflection-based mentoring. The results illustrate that reflection-based methods are demanding for mentors. If direct approaches are more effective, additional evidence would be required to support mentor training that heavily emphasises reflection.

Longitudinal and quasi-experimental studies are needed to support inferences about causality. Variable omission may have influenced the models. More research is needed to better understand the concept of reflection-based mentoring.

This paper contributes to the mentoring field by examining mentors’ preference for reflection based and clear mentoring and how such preferences are related to self-efficacy and effort. It also contributes to general and theoretical discussions about the relationships between beliefs about mentoring and mentor characteristics.

This paper examines some issues that arise from recent research on mentoring across a range of professional settings including teaching, nursing, medicine and social work. It discusses different models of mentoring and their potential relevance to the professional development of specialists and non‐specialists involved in health promotion. It recommends the development of an agreed and clear operational definition of what mentoring is and what it is expected to achieve, a policy framework so that those in mentoring relationships are aware of aims and expectations, good “fit” between the underlying ethos of health promotion and the model of mentoring adopted and proper resources and administration. It also suggests that mentoring schemes need the support of senior managers, clear arrangements for the recruitment, training and support of mentors, careful consideration of the basis upon which mentors and mentees are matched, and ground rules for the mentoring relationship, including those relating to confidentiality.

The purpose of this paper is to review and highlight key findings, themes and ideas from selected published academic papers on mentoring in education, with a specific focus on how mentoring can foster the professional learning and development of educators at all stages of their professional development.

The author conducted a literature review of all the papers published in the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, from Volume 1, Issue 1 (2012) to Volume 4, Issue 4 (2015), that contained the word “mentoring” in either the title, abstract and/or keywords and with a discussion of mentoring in the main text. In total, 37 papers were analysed in order to create a meta-synthesis of the primary findings.

The findings present factors that foster mentoring success or failure. The purposes and components of mentoring programmes are diverse and contextually bound. Additionally, there is a tendency to view mentoring as a developmental relationship in which the mentor shares knowledge and expertise to support the mentee’s learning and professional development.

As this meta-synthesis literature review is focussed on articles published in a single journal on mentoring, it has limited scope. However, the range of countries in which the authors of the reviewed empirical studies reside (13 countries), and the diversity of papers included in this review allowed the author to summarize and synthesize unique information for researchers and practitioners who are seeking to understand the process, outcomes and issues related to mentoring for the professional development of educators.

The review provides information for those seeking to study and implement mentoring programmes. It focusses on mentoring for professional development of educators, identifies primary concepts in the literature reviewed and highlights new research areas in mentoring in education.

This literature review discusses mentoring definitions from 37 different papers and contributes important knowledge to produce a picture of the intricacy of mentoring. Complex issues linked with mentoring are addressed, generating a critical systematization of mentoring research likely to have a lasting influence in the field.

To support student teachers' well-being and ensure that they flourish during teacher education, it is necessary to examine the relationship between student teachers and their mentors during field experiences. Previous research has identified a connection between the quality of the mentor–mentee relationship and facets of student teachers' well-being. However, to date, this link has been insufficiently corroborated using longitudinal empirical data. This study aims to investigate the impact of mentor–mentee relationship quality on the well-being and flourishing of student teachers.

A cross-lagged panel design with two intervals (six weeks apart) was applied during a 15-week field experience with a sample of 125 German student teachers. Well-being and flourishing were captured using the positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement (PERMA) framework. Relationship quality was assessed by adapting a questionnaire from the field of mentoring in medicine.

Relationship quality at the outset significantly predicted all five PERMA dimensions at the end of the assessment period. The impact of relationship quality was especially strong on the dimensions of relationships (R) and meaning (M). Conversely, the PERMA dimensions (except achievement) did not significantly impact relationship quality.

These results provide longitudinal empirical evidence underlining the beneficial effects of a healthy relationship between mentor and mentee in the field of teacher education. The findings clearly suggest that the relationship quality significantly influences student teachers' well-being and capacity to flourish during practical phases.

The mentoring of beginning teachers has not received enough critical examination. Argues that a body of knowledge does exist which forms a basis for a better theoretical understanding of mentoring as a concept, and as an activity within organizations. By drawing on literature beyond the field of initial teacher education, and on empirical work conducted by the author on the student‐in‐school experience, a case is made for the development of natural mentoring in schools.