Trial lecture - time and place
Adjudication committee
- 1. Opponent: Professor Sven-Erik Hansén, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
- 2. Opponent: Professor Eva Merete Bjerkholt, The University of South-Eastern, Norway
- Chair of the committee: Associate Professor Katrine Nesje, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor Emerita Eli Ottersen, Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Professor Emeritus Trond Eiliv Hauge, Department of teacher education and school research, University of Oslo, Norway
- Professor Anniken Furberg, Department of teacher education and school research, University of Oslo, Norway
Summary
This thesis focuses on mentoring of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) during their first year of working. The overarching goal is to investigate how mentors with completed formal qualifications from a Norwegian mentor education program make use of mentoring conversations to mentor NQTs about teachers’ work. Here I understand teachers’ work as key work tasks including teaching, class management and assessment. This thesis consists of three studies, presented in three individual articles, along with an extended abstract. The three related studies focus on examining and understanding different aspects of qualified mentors’ work mentoring NQTs through conversations, and the articles cover the following topics: 1) What is the content of mentoring conversations and which discussion topics do the participants prioritize most (Article I), 2) The mentoring process and mentor’s use of dialogical resources in consecutive conversations, as well as the potential contributions to an NQT’s learning about their own teaching work (Article II), and 3) How can mentor support NQTs through mentoring conversations (Article III). The data material consists of sound recordings and transcripts of conversation data analyzed in order to shed light on interactions, and is based on observations of 72 mentoring conversations with four formally qualified mentors and 26 first year NQTs participating. The methodological approach to analyzing this data material is based in Grounded Theory Method and interaction analysis. I am employing symbolic interactionism as a theoretical framework to analyze meaning content, and sociocultural learning theory is used to understand process, professional learning and language interaction in mentoring. Other relevant theoretical contributions and concepts from earlier studies of mentoring by other researchers are also employed in the analyses and in order to interpret the observed mentoring.
At an overarching level, findings from article I contribute by showing what content is being discussed and what priorities are made in mentoring NQTs. I found that issues relating to teaching/class management, as well as assessment, were discussed most frequently. Findings from both articles II and III contribute to illustrate in more detail how qualified mentors may work to guide the mentoring by means of using dialogical resources. The findings of article II indicate that mentors qualified through a Norwegian mentoring education program show skills in dialogical communication and manage to guide mentoring in the direction of themes relevant to professional development. In article III, I develop theoretical concepts to help decide the type of support that mentors may offer in a conversation, and thearticle shows examples of the different ways qualified mentors provide support and challenges to NQTs during mentoring conversations.
The thesis sheds light on mentoring mechanisms and examines new teachers’ options to learn through mentoring. The perspective of mentors is foregrounded, yet the perspectives of both sides of the mentoring relationship are highlighted through the focus on interactions. More and new knowledge on mentoring work is of interest to actors such as mentors, school leaders and school owners with their varying degrees of responsibility for arranging mentoring locally, but this may be of particular importance to mentors’ possibilities for increasing their understanding of their own work and to develop their mentoring in line with empirically based knowledge. Such knowledge may also contribute to critical reflection on how to develop, improve and organize mentoring in order to contribute to professional learning, as well as aid in critical reflection on issues related to the possibilities and limitations of using mentoring conversations to mentor NQTs and on what role subject specific topics should play in the mentoring of NQTs. Empirically based knowledge on how qualified mentors practice mentoring may also be of interest to higher education programs that offer mentor education.
This work was completed at, and supported by, the Department of Teacher Education and School Research and Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo.