Is mentoring of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in Wales supportive of the development of teacher professionalism or simply adding to NQTs’ ‘to-do lists’?

JULIA HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF WALES TRINITY SAINT DAVID, UK

ALEX MORGAN, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, UK

EMMAJANE MILTON, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, UK

Introduction

This small-scale, qualitative, longitudinal study explored NQTs’ experiences of being mentored by following nine individuals throughout their first year of teaching to understand the nature of the mentoring support that they received. Undertaken against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, findings indicated that the mentoring approaches experienced by NQTs were largely instrumental. These were dominated by administrative tasks to meet external quality-assurance requirements through the documenting and recording of experiences. Findings illuminated that mentoring experiences were onerous and simply added to NQTs’ ‘to-do lists’, because they were focused almost exclusively on technically meeting the standards and instrumentally documenting these. This was consistently privileged and prioritised, leaving little time and space to engage in essential professional learning through critical collaborative conversations that problematised and interrogated practice in order to develop expertise. Importantly, these impoverished approaches to mentoring NQTs were not different to the instrumental practices identified prior to the pandemic (Waters, 2020). This article is therefore relevant because if sustained, these practices would be highly concerning and have enduring implications for the profession.

High-quality professional learning experiences for NQTs

There is international consensus that the induction period for NQTs is an ‘intense and formative time in learning to teach’ (Feiman-Nemser, 2001, p. 1026) and that NQTs need opportunities for professional learning that are sustained over time and highly contextualised – this has been shown to be transformative for their teaching practice and student learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Keay et al., 2019). This type of professional learning includes promoting approaches that equip NQTs to develop their rationales for practice (Milton and Morgan, 2023) and involves collaboration with others and ‘reflection and critical engagement with professional practice’ (Holloway, 2023, p. 16). To realise this, NQTs (and all teachers more broadly) need to be supported by high-quality and educative mentoring experiences that are central to developing professional growth and adaptive expertise (Hammerness et al., 2012; Langdon and Ward, 2015). Mentoring dialogues that are educative privilege:

• ‘going beyond quick fixes and easy answers
• viewing themselves fundamentally as learners
• seeking out and valuing alternate perspectives
• engaging in practice-informed theorising
• collecting pertinent evidence/data from practice as a basis for decision-making
• privileging partnership, reciprocal learning and rejecting novice–expert hierarchies
• questioning established orthodoxies and ways of working.’ (Milton and Morgan, 2023, p. 1079)

The Welsh context

This data was collected against the backdrop of extensive change in educational policies in Wales, and included new professional standards (Welsh Government, 2017a), reformed teacher education (Furlong, 2015) and the preparation for the new ambitious Curriculum for Wales (CfW) (Welsh Government, 2017b). In order to support the development of CfW, the Welsh Government (2017b, p. 25) recognised the pivotal role of a ‘well-supported, ambitious teaching profession’. It highlighted the need for a firm emphasis on supporting NQTs’ development of ‘reflective practice, effective collaboration, coaching and mentoring, and effective use of data and research evidence’ in order to consolidate ITE experiences and to promote ‘career-long professional growth’ (Bryer et al., 2020, p. 24).

Methodology

The methodological approach and the ethical considerations of this study were developed in line with BERA’s (2018) ethical guidance and approved by Cardiff University. Data collection involved four discrete rounds of semi-structured online interviews, undertaken with nine NQTs across Wales during the academic year 2020/21. The participants were all employed in Wales on fixed-term temporary contracts at the start of their induction year and were teaching across diverse primary and secondary settings in both English- and Welsh-medium schools. Four rounds of interviews were chosen to provide longitudinal data and were spaced throughout the academic year. All interviews were anonymised (using pseudonyms), transcribed and then analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2006). CodingIn qualitative research, coding involves breaking down data into component parts, which are given names. In quantitative research, codes are numbers that are assigned to data that are not inherently numerical (e.g. in a questionnaire the answer 'strongly agree' is assigned a 5) so that information can be statistically processed. of the data was undertaken rigorously, with meaningful and recurring patterns synthesised into themes (not all reported in this article). Those related to mentoring included: 

• impact of COVID-19 on mentoring experiences
• instrumental nature of the mentoring experienced and the lack of opportunities to problematise classroom practice.

The impact of COVID-19 on mentoring experiences

The mentoring experiences of these NQTs during this period of the COVID-19 pandemic were impacted in multiple ways. These included mentor meetings becoming shorter and more infrequent, which these NQTs perceived as indicating that they were less of a priority. For some NQTs, their meetings ceased to exist entirely:

After that, then, sort of through lockdown, we had a catch-up call now and again when we could, just to see how everything’s going… we didn’t meet up [when in school] over that period of time through lockdown. It was just sort of Teams calls and quick catch-ups if we needed.

Esme

Another NQT talked about how, without the opportunities to chat and talk to other staff in the staffroom (because of COVID-19 restrictions), they felt very isolated: 

I think… that we’re all feeling incredibly isolated, that we are feeling quite alone… in terms of not being able to share feedback on our lessons or have again a sort of chat, a conversation about the school, a conversation with an adult, share any issues with behaviours or successes.

Marcus

The databrings into sharp relief just how important high-quality mentoring experiences potentially were for NQTs at this time. In fact, it has been argued that extra support was needed for NQTs, who had already been subjected to a compromised initial teacher education (ITE) experience (la Velle et al., 2020; Morgan and Milton, 2024) and who were already feeling at the start of the induction year that they were ‘half-trained’ (Jane) and facing a ‘baptism of fire’ (Gabby).

The instrumental nature of mentoring experiences and the lack of opportunities to problematise classroom practice.

Findings from this study indicated that, in the main, mentor meetings were dominated almost entirely by evidencing the professional standards in a fairly instrumental and tick-box way. 

We [would]… look through which standards are in there. So, if it was pedagogy, for example, we might look at advancing the learning, then… read what the actual description is for that standard and then talk about what I have done that would fit that standard.

Esme

[It] felt like the NQT mentor that I’ve had is just “have you done this, have you done this standard, have you mapped it?” It’s very clinical. I don’t think she’s there as a supportive figure. She’s there to make sure you pass your NQT. It’s very ticking boxes.

John

John went on to highlight that he felt that mentor meetings were ‘just about write-ups [to evidence the standards] and not teaching and learning’. He felt that mentor meetings were purely an administrative endeavour to meet the requirements of the professional standards. 

For some NQTs, even the process of documenting the standards seemed unthinking and a little mechanical. Richard described his mentor setting him the target of writing up ‘one template per week’ in order to evidence the standards, which he felt was problematic and ‘not natural’. He also felt that his mentor had a prescriptive and strictly dogmatic approach to the way in which he evidenced his experiences in writing using the exact language of the standards themselves, and that this requirement had detracted from his ability to think deeply about his practice:

I find that a little bit cloistering… I don’t think it limits the practice at all, I think it limits the reflection on my practice. Potentially I think it limits the sort of way I think about it and the way that it’s permitted for me to express that. But yeah, my fear is… the writing of the experience templates is ticking boxes then.

Richard

At the end of the induction year, he drew some conclusions about the lack of benefit that he had gained from working with his mentor:

It’s not especially a dialogue which causes you to think deeply. I wouldn’t say that the dialogue between my mentor and myself is something that causes me to think more deeply, more that it was a cause to add to my to-do list…

Richard

Conclusion

The NQTs in this study experienced induction mentoring as being primarily focused on bringing them into the existing cultures of the schools that they were in; however, from their reports, there seems to be a lack of emphasis on thinking deeply and critically about practice. It seemed that that mentor meetings were largely focused on immediate school needs, meeting the standards, and surviving and getting through the induction year. To an extent, this may be understandable and not surprising, given the context and need to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, it seems that these practices were not created by the pandemic but had been evident prior to this (Waters, 2020). But given what is known about the significance of and need for high-quality support for NQT professional formation and the development of their adaptive expertise, it is highly concerning, and any continuing impoverished practices in the support and mentoring of NQTs need to be identified, acknowledged and addressed.

The instrumental, narrow approaches to mentoring documented in this study dominated conversations, simply adding to the NQTs’ ‘to-do lists’. Their stories indicate that this denied them the opportunity to develop their own rationales for practice, essential for developing agency and adaptive expertise (Hammerness et al., 2012). We argue that the danger is that these reductive, technical and managerial ways of enacting mentoring position the NQTs as merely ‘receivers’ of school policy (Ball, 2016, p. 632) and are likely to fail to equip them sufficiently to engage critically with their practice. This could encourage NQTs to unthinkingly replicate practices that are not tailored for their learners (Langdon and Ward, 2015) at a given time in a specific context.

These NQTs felt the absence of educative approaches to mentoring (Langdon and Ward, 2015), and we argue that the lack of critical conversations focused on their practice in their mentor experiences denied them opportunities to develop their thinking about this. It is likely that these experiences also failed to model how important it is to scrutinise and explore practice in order to improve learner experiences and outcomes. Given that these experiences may resonate more broadly, it seems vital that ongoing professional learning and mentoring support that is more educative in nature is prioritised, in order to better equip developing teachers as they progress in their careers. These findings also have implications for how a more developed understanding of what it means to lead, mentor and support all colleagues educatively (Langdon and Ward, 2015; Milton and Morgan, 2023) can be leveraged in order to support their adaptive expertise and growth (Hammerness et al., 2012).