Caroline Daly and Emmajane Milton
The purpose of this paper is to report on a qualitative study of the learning and development of 70 external mentors during the first year of their deployment to support early…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on a qualitative study of the learning and development of 70 external mentors during the first year of their deployment to support early career teachers’ professional learning as part of a national initiative aimed at school improvement in Wales.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopted a narrative methodology that elicited accounts of external mentors’ learning experiences that were captured as textual data and analysed using an inductive approach to identify: first, the manifest themes that appeared at declarative level, and second, the latent (sub-textual) themes of external mentor learning and development.
Findings
Four key themes emerged that indicate the complexity of transition to the role of external mentor in high-stakes contexts. From these, eight theoretically-informed principles were derived which support mentors to embrace uncertainty as essential to their learning and development, and to harness the potential they bring as boundary-crossers to support the development of new teachers.
Research limitations/implications
The study investigated the first year of a three-year programme and worked with one form of qualitative data collection. The research results may lack generalisability and a longitudinal study is necessary to further explore the validity of the findings.
Practical implications
The eight principles provide a foundation for mentor development programmes that can support ambitious goals for mentoring early career teachers.
Originality/value
The study addresses the under-researched area of the learning and development of external mentors at a national scale.