Tracing ideas about mentoring newly qualified teachers and the expectations of school leadership in policy documents

Figures & data

Table 1. Description of the documents analyzed in the study.

#	Title of Document	Description	Authors
D1	White paper 11 (2009) The role of the Teacher and the Education	White paper about the teacher’s role.	Ministry of Education and Research (MER)
D2	White paper 21 (2017) Desire to learn - Early Intervention and Quality in Schools	White paper about teachers’ and school leaders’ professional development.	MER
D3	The strategy - Teacher Education 2025 – A national strategy for quality and collaboration within teacher educations (2017)	Strategy document about teacher education.	MER
D4	Principles & Commitments – Mentoring of newly qualified teachers (2017)	Basic document, part of a framework for mentoring NQT.	MER
D5	The guidelines for the mentoring of newly qualified teachers – How to enact it in practice? (2018)	Guidelines for mentoring NQT.	The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (NDET)

Table 2. The three ideas and how they are made thinkable, calculable, and practicable.

How ideas are made	Idea 1: mentoring as a matter of institutionalization	Idea 2: mentoring as a matter of career-long collective professional development and learning	Idea 3: mentoring as a matter of improved boundary work across sectors
Thinkable	By presenting national and international research about NQT as a large group of the teacher workforce and to what degree they need mentoring.	By referring to transnational organizations describing the idea of continuous collective professional development and how mentoring is connected to this.	By presenting research pinpointing a lack of collaboration between teacher education and the field of practice.
Calculable	By presenting guidelines for mentoring NQT.	By presenting NQT and mentors as resources “for enhancing continuous collective professional development” and requesting a framework focusing on the need of professional development.	By establishing agreements and principles committing actors from different institutions to enact collaboration and by pointing out actors responsible.
Practicable	By presenting practitioner voices describing the systematizing of mentoring in their local context.	By presenting examples from practice in municipalities describing mentoring as a part of career-long learning.	By presenting examples from practice illustrating benefits of collaboration.