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The purpose of this paper is to highlight university-based mentor education as a negative antecedent to mentors’ beliefs which are consistent with judgementoring (Hobson and Malderez, 2013). The concept of beliefs consistent with judgementoring (evaluative or judgemental mentoring) is introduced as a quantitative construct which is then used as a dependent variable. The concept of “folk mentoring” is introduced to theorise why and how mentor education may challenge mentors’ beliefs about mentoring.

Structural equation modelling of cross-sectional survey data is used to estimate and compare the strengths between mentors’ perceived self-efficacy, role clarity, experience and education as independent variables and beliefs about mentoring aligned with judgementoring as the dependent variable. The survey was completed by 146 mentors who attended mentor education programmes in universities and university colleges across Norway.

The findings indicate that mentor education contributes to lower levels of beliefs consistent with judgementoring and strengthens mentors’ awareness of their role as a mentor. Higher levels of self-efficacy related to the mentor role were associated with stronger beliefs consistent with judgementoring. Mentor experience was not associated strongly with any tested variable.

This paper identifies new questions pertaining to the effects of mentor education and variables associated with judgementoring. Omitted variables might have influenced the explored models and the methods used do not allow us to determine causal relationships.

Taking an approach based on social exchange theory, the authors describe judgementoring as a form of mentoring that hampers potential exchanges which would enable mentoring to contribute to professional development. This paper provides new insights into judgementoring by introducing it as a quantitative construct, by testing relevant antecedents and by introducing the concept of “folk mentoring”. Mentor education is highlighted as a potential moderator of mentors’ beliefs in judgementoring.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to extend existing knowledge on the nature, reach, causes and consequences of judgementoring; second, to present a new framework for mentoring beginner teachers that has the potential to forestall and combat judgementoring, and enable the full potential of institution-based mentoring to be realised.

The paper draws on a thematic analysis of: previously published findings from three empirical studies undertaken between 2003 and 2015; new data from two empirical studies undertaken between 2012 and 2016; and recent literature (2013-2016) on judgementoring.

The paper provides further evidence of the nature, reach, causes and consequences of judgementoring as a national and international phenomenon. In doing so, it extends previous knowledge about the conditions that enhance or detract from the successful enactment of beginner teacher mentoring.

The findings presented have implications for the work of education policymakers, school and college leaders, mentor trainers, mentors and others concerned with enhancing mentorship and effectively supporting the professional learning, development and well-being of beginning teachers.

The paper presents ONSIDE Mentoring as an original, research-informed framework for mentoring beginner teachers. The framework may also be applicable to other contexts, especially for the mentoring of early career professionals.

The purpose of this article is to identify and examine root causes of the failure of school‐based mentoring to realize its full potential.

The article draws on the re‐analysis of data from two major mixed‐method empirical studies carried out in England. It focuses on data generated from interviews with beginner teachers and mentors in both primary and secondary schools.

The findings point to a failure to create appropriate conditions for effective mentoring in England at the level of the mentoring relationship, the school, and the national policy context.

Implications of the findings include the need to achieve a greater degree of informed consensus on the meaning and purposes of mentoring in teacher education, and to ensure that mentors of beginner teachers are appropriately trained for the role.

The article identifies the practice of judgemental mentoring or “judgementoring” as an obstacle to school‐based mentoring realizing its potential and an impediment to the professional learning and wellbeing of beginner teachers. It also points to worrying indications that judgementoring may be becoming, through accrued experiences, the default understanding of mentoring in England.

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.

The author's purpose is to identify and analyze the progress of proposals and dissertations after mentor–mentee relationships rapidly transitioned to intensive online doctoral mentoring as a result of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).

An exploratory pedagogic research design was implemented in 2020 to examine the COVID-19 Dyadic Online Mentoring Intervention, a four-month individualized approach to mentorship. A survey was completed by mentees in an educational leadership cohort that revealed the benefits and drawbacks of technology for learning within online doctoral mentoring contexts. Additional sources of data were published literature, mentor's notes, email exchanges, and scholarly enrichment products.

Data analysis yielded three themes: (1) mentoring strategies were utilized; (2) the pandemic unsettled reality and (3) personal professional development opportunities were evident. Although life challenges were exacerbated by the pandemic, the online doctoral mentoring intervention met dissertation-related needs and supported academic progress in a Doctorate in Education degree program.

Technology-mediated mentoring during crises involves more than modality changes. Faculty mentors should not be solely responsible for mitigating program and dissertation disruption. Academic cultures must support the adoption of pedagogic innovations like high-quality online doctoral mentoring.

Online doctoral mentoring structures utilizing synchronous and asynchronous technologies can help mentees make academic progress in a crisis, not only in “normal” times.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of mentoring as a workplace process. The mentees are post-graduate student teachers hosted in placement schools. The research aims to explore the experiences of key participants in a policy context where the role and scale of school-based teacher training is expanding rapidly.

This is an interpretative case study of mentoring practices assigned to a secondary level initial teacher training partnership, with the mentors being subject teachers working in school departments which host post-graduate student teachers. The case study was investigated over two years and included focus groups, interviews, questionnaires and content analysis. Participants were student teachers, their mentors and both school-based and university-based tutors.

Positive experiences of mentoring are not universal. Mentoring interacts with the required processes of monitoring and reporting and in some cases the power structures associated with these processes conflict with the less performative aspects. However, when mentors are offered evidence of student teachers’ perceptions and theoretical constructs of mentoring as practice they can start to recognise that it can be enhanced.

The quality of mentoring in initial teacher education will take on even greater significance in jurisdictions, such as England, where the role of workplace learning is strengthened as a result of changes of government policy.

The outcomes of this study will be relevant to policy makers, school-based mentors and system leaders for teacher education – whether school or university based.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse feedback in the context of secondary initial teacher education (ITE) in England. More specifically, it aims to examine the feedback experiences of physical education (PE) subject mentors and their associate teachers (ATs) during a one-year postgraduate programme.

Semi-structured interviews, with nine PE mentors and 11 ATs within a university ITE partnership, were used to explore lesson feedback and the context in which it was provided. Interview data from the 20 participants were analysed through constant comparison to categorise content and identify patterns of responses.

Mentors were well versed in the formal feedback mechanism of a written lesson observation. This approach is well established and accepted within ITE, but the dialogic feedback that follows lessons was thought to be where ATs made most progress. These learning conversations were seen to provide less formal but more authentic feedback for those learning to teach, and were most successful when founded on positive and collaborative relationships between the mentor and the ATs.

These findings have implications for providers of teacher education and more specifically how they approach mentor training. The focus on lesson observations has value, but examining more informal dialogic approaches to feedback may have more impact on the learning of ATs.

These findings support the value of lesson feedback but challenge the primacy of formal written lesson observations. The learning conversations that follow lessons are shown to provide authentic feedback for ATs.

This chapter offers an original conceptualization of co-mentoring – situated in the wider literature – together with evidence of its impact and factors facilitating impact across applications of co-mentoring in transnational schooling contexts. Co-mentoring is an alternative to more traditional, hierarchical, and unidirectional approaches to mentoring in education. Extending the extant literature on collaborative mentoring (or “comentoring”), co-mentoring is a collaborative, compassionate, and developmental relationship – informed by specific approaches to mentoring and coaching – that is intended to support participants' professional learning, development, effectiveness, and well-being, and potentially improve their workplace cultures. Detailing three different applications of co-mentoring across the United Kingdom and United States, the chapter evidences the realization of these intended outcomes (professional learning, etc.), and highlights factors found to be instrumental in facilitating the positive impacts of co-mentoring. We end with recommendations for undertaking research and practice that build human and organizational capacity through co-mentoring. A takeaway is that intentional approaches to co-mentoring can have value for participating parties and broader impact, as well as wide applicability.

This paper aims to consider the practices and experiences of the new school-based mentors for Early Career Teachers (ECT's), emerging from the UK Government's new early career framework (ECF) policy (DfE, 2019a). The paper uses Lipsky's (2010) framing of professionals as “street level bureaucrats” to consider the extent to which the ECT mentors, as new policy actors, exercise professional discretion (Lipsky, 2010) in negotiating and aligning the new ECF policy with existing practice.

To research the mentor's interpretation and enactment of the new ECF policy, semi structured interviews were undertaken with an initial sample of nine mentors and four induction tutors who were also mentors. Online semi structured interviews were held, lasting around 50 min. This method was largely pragmatic as the study started during a period when schools were still cautious of face-to-face visitors in terms of COVID-19. Although the benefits for the interviewer experiencing the culture and context in which the ECT mentor was situated were lost, offering online interviews was critical in securing mentors' time.

Findings suggest a disconnect between the intentions of the policy and the reality of its enactment at a local level. The ECT mentors have limited professional discretion, but some are exercising this in relation to their own professional development and the training they are providing for their ECTs. Most of the mentors are adapting the ECT's professional development journey whilst mindful of the programme requirements. The degree to which the ECT mentors used professional discretion was linked and limited largely by their own levels of confidence and experience of mentoring, and to a lesser extent the culture of their schools.

The ECF policy represents an important step in acknowledging the need to professionally develop mentors for the work they undertake supporting beginning teachers. However, the time and the content of the mentor training have not been given sufficient attention and remains a hugely missed opportunity. It does not appear to be recognised by the government policy makers but more significantly and concerning in this research sample it is not being recognised sufficiently by those mentoring the ECTs themselves.

There is an urgent need by the UK government and school leaders to understand the link between the quality of mentor preparation and the quality of the ECTs who will be entering the profession and influencing the quality of education in future years. More time and resourcing need to be focussed on the professional development of mentors enabling them to exercise professional discretion in increasingly sophisticated ways in relation to the implementation of the ECF policy.

The ECF policy is the latest English government response to international concerns around the recruitment and retention of teachers. The policy mandates for a new policy actor: the ECT mentor, responsible for the support and professional development of beginning teachers. The nature of the mentor's role in relation to the policy is emerging and provides an interesting case study in the disconnect between the intentions of a policy and its initial enactment on the ground. The mentors may be viewed as street level bureaucrats exercising degrees of professional discretion as they interpret the policy in their own school context.

This paper synthesises international research on effective mentor training, education and development (MTED).

An adaptive theory methodology (Layder, 1998), combining deductive and inductive methods, was deployed in a qualitative meta-synthesis of thematic findings generated in three studies: a systematic review of literature published between January 2010 and July 2020, together with a secondary analysis of studies including evidence on MTED; a subsequent systematic review of literature published between August 2020 and May 2023 and a general inductive analysis (Thomas, 2006) of interviews of leaders of large-scale MTED programmes that had good evidence of impact.

Our meta-synthesis found that effective MTED is evidence-based, refined through ongoing research, tailored both to individual needs and context and includes sustained support. Effective pedagogical approaches in MTED are underpinned by adult learning principles and establish a learning climate that fosters open and trusting relationships. Effective MTED is shaped by the espoused mentoring model or approach, with particular emphasis on understanding, building and sustaining mentoring relationships and incorporating observing, practising, critically reflecting on and receiving feedback on mentoring.

The study will be helpful to practitioners designing, reviewing and evaluating MTED programmes, researchers seeking to enhance the sparse MTED evidence base and programme commissioners.

The original and significant contribution of this study is the identification of key principles relating to the overall design of – as well as specific content, pedagogical approaches and supporting resources within – MTED programmes that have evidenced positive effects on mentors, mentees, mentoring and/or organisations.