The key determinants of the quality of mentoring in teaching profession

Abstract

The review paper discusses the phenomenon of the quality of mentoring in the con-text of professional development of teacher interns. Although mentoring is considered as a suitable framework for high quality professional development, not enough attention has been paid to the phenomenon/topic of “the quality of mentoring”. This has been confirmed by our initial analysis of the situation in this field based on collecting relevant literature published in the past twenty years. The analysis of the selected papers was organised around two research questions: (1) Why is the topic of the quality of mentoring underrepresented in relevant literature? and (2) What are the determinants of the quality of mentoring? Through the analysis of leading review and meta-analytic papers in the problem field of mentoring we singled out the following as possible reasons for a scarcity of studies on the quality of mentoring: the complexity of the concept of mentoring, the focus of the papers dealing with mentoring on the instrumental while neglecting the explanatory, the overemphasis of positive contributions of mentoring, the lack of agreement on the issue of the outcomes of mentoring. In the second part of the paper, by applying the structural analysis procedure to the selected texts, we formulated and elaborated the thesis about the three key determinants of the quality of mentoring: (1) the quality of informality of the mentoring process, (2) specific nature of the learning process, (3) harmonising the peculiarities of the paradigmatic framework of mentoring with the real capacities of the specific school environment. The concluding part of the paper points out to implications for practice regarding the preparatory work with mentors and initial development of mentoring programmes.