Qualification of mentors for NQT: a review

Mentoring is an element in an induction program. Mentors own competences are imperative for a successful support for the NQT, especially regarding mentoring with educative mentoring (Bradbury, 2010). Unqualified mentoring can have negative effects (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011; Shockley et al., 2013). Hence, the importance of mentors receiving qualified A good mentoring education includes mentoring tools that are adaptable to local context, special attention to student learning in mentoring of NQTs, and special focus on inquiry to understand the specific context. Aspfors and Fransson’s meta-synthesis on mentor education suggest that in developing mentoring education, one should consider a contextual dimension, a theoretical-analytical dimension and a relational dimension. This will qualify the mentors “(self-)understanding of teaching and mentoring”(Aspfors & Fransson, In earlier empirical research of Danish NQTs, it is found that NQTs who have had mentors with some kind of mentoring education have dialogues about subject content, pedagogical and didactical content to a much higher degree, than the NQTs who had mentors without education (Frederiksen, Krøjgaard, & Paaske, 2017).