Work-based learning partnerships: mentor-teachers’ perceptions of student teachers’ challenges

ABSTRACT

Background

For prospective teachers, the school-based learning component of their teacher education programme is a crucial, and often demanding, part of becoming a teacher. During this time, mentor-teachers work in close collaboration with student teachers, who are often teaching in an actual school setting for the first time. As the relationship between mentor-teacher and student teacher is pivotal to the quality of work-based learning and to supporting the professional development of prospective teachers, more needs to be understood about this complex dynamic.

Purpose

Our study aimed to contribute to this area by investigating, from the viewpoint of mentor-teachers, how student teachers respond to the demands of work-based learning. It had a particular focus on mentor-teachers’ perceptions of student teachers’ emotional challenges associated with teaching and engagement.

Methods

Data consisted of interviews with 22 experienced mentor -teachers from five different municipalities. Data were analysed qualitatively, using tools aligned with a constructivist grounded theory approach.

Findings

Describing teaching as a complex practice, the mentor-teachers regarded proactive engagement in developing professionalism, and ability to make appropriately differentiated adjustments to their teaching as important criteria in their evaluation of student teacher progression. The mentor-teachers described student teachers’ emotional challenges in relation to these and discussed support strategies.

Conclusions

The findings of the study highlight the complex dynamic of work-based learning and the key role that mentor-teachers can play in supporting the development of prospective teachers entering the profession, including the navigation of emotionally challenging situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-based learning
• teaching practice
• teacher education
• pre-service teachers, mentor-teacher
• engagement

Introduction

Work-based learning is a crucial part of most initial teacher education programmes and involves pre-service, or student teachers developing their teaching skills in an actual school setting. During work-based learning, an experienced teacher working in a school is designated to mentor the student teacher, who is given the opportunity to observe and undertake teacher practice. The mentor-teacher typically forms a close and dyadic link with the student teacher when they work together (Orland-Barak 2002). The relationship between the mentor-teacher and the student is complex and pivotal to the quality of work-based learning (Hobson et al. 2009). In addition, the outcome and success of work-based learning play an important part in the student teacher’s educational experience (Izadinia 2015). As well as providing instruction and support, mentor-teachers evaluate the student teacher they are mentoring. Such evaluations are made according to set criteria, but are also based on often informal assumptions about what constitutes suitable and unsuitable behaviour for a professional teacher. Suitable teacher behaviour is defined as what is expected of teachers in a particular cultural context (Lindqvist and Nordänger 2018). This includes being perceived as having the right values, being perceived as having social skills and being perceived as being committed to in-depth learning as a teacher (Lindqvist et al. 2022).

For the student teacher, the experience of learning how to teach in the school setting is likely to be one of the most demanding components of the teacher education programme. Research indicates that student teachers might show signs of burnout during work-based learning (Fives, Hamman, and Olivarez 2007; Kokkinos and Stavropoulos 2016), feel that they are not valued (Sumsion 1998), or face dilemmas because of how their mentor-teachers act (Deng et al. 2018; Lindqvist, Thornberg, and Colnerud 2020).

Emotions, and emotional challenges, therefore, tend to play an important part in this work-based learning situation. In the present study, emotions are understood as socially constructed and an integral part of relationships (Uitto, Jokikokko, and Estola 2015; Zembylas 2007). They are thus regarded as embedded in relationships between student teachers and mentor-teachers. Moreover, emotional challenges are defined as relationships, situations and interactions perceived as distressful or unpleasant by a person. This includes the person having to use a strategy to cope with perceived challenges (Lindqvist et al. 2017). More needs to be understood about mentor-teachers’ perceptions of how student teachers respond to emotional challenges. This could help to increase our understanding of the complex dynamic of work-based learning and the relationship between mentor-teachers and student teachers, which is essential to supporting the development of prospective teachers entering the profession. Mentor-teachers’ reasoning about student teachers’ emotional challenges could contribute to creating supportive structures, ultimately assisting student teachers to grow as future teachers (Lindqvist et al. 2021).

Background

The role of mentor-teachers

Mentor-teachers play a key role in establishing work-based learning as a positive learning experience for student teachers. The prospective teachers commonly start by observing teachers and lessons in school. In their study, Donlon et al. (2020) found that student teachers who did not teach, but only observed teachers, still enhanced their understanding about working in a school; moreover, following a mentor-teacher increased student teachers’ sense of belonging, confidence in teaching and sense of identity as a teacher. Additionally, reporting on a year-long study of six student teachers, Rozelle and Wilson (2012) found that their teaching was substantially influenced by the cooperating teachers’ practices. Successful mentoring is considered a collaborative effort and is dependent on how well both the mentor and the student-teacher remain focused on working together (Aspfors and Bondas 2013; Draves 2008). Mentoring is envisaged as a reflective process that takes place between the student teacher and the mentor-teacher (Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen 2014). This would not be possible unless both parties in the mentoring relationship intend to understand the other’s perspective. For example, Aderibigbe, Gray, and Colucci-Gray (2018, 67) argue:

Mentoring is foregrounded as an embodied and deeply emotional practice, involving the ability to make oneself receptive to others, as well as being able to exert self-control when necessary, in order to allow for innovation and new perspectives which may emerge via mutual trust.

To establish trust, student teachers and mentor-teachers must be able to take different perspectives. In their case study of a school, Lofthouse and Thomas (2014) found that experiences of work-based learning were affected by how well the joint planning and the relationship between the mentor-teacher and student teacher evolved. They describe the risk of mentor-teachers focusing on narrow definitions of technical aspects of teaching, which ‘may lead participants in teacher education to overlook the complex, iterative, and relatively fragile processes which underpin initial teacher development’ (Lofthouse and Thomas 2014, 216). According to Hobson (2016), student teachers and mentor-teachers should establish a mentoring relationship that is as non-hierarchal as possible, to promote trust between them. Collaboration is essential for successful work-based learning (Draves 2008). Therefore, successful mentoring involves trying to understand the student teachers’ perspective and exploring reflections, which includes trying to understand the challenges that student teachers may encounter.

Research on mentoring critically examines the risk of it becoming an unproductive, one-sided arrangement, where the expert leads the novice in trying to learn a profession (Hobson 2016; McGraw and Davis 2017). This kind of relationship is characterised by a power imbalance, where the mentor-teacher holds the ‘key to the gates’ of becoming a full member of the teacher community. In some cases, student teachers feel powerless to voice their concerns (Lilach 2020). Typical shortcomings of mentoring described in literature involve ‘judgmentoring’ (Hobson 2016), using questions that are confirmatory rather than reflective (Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen 2014), and a lack of challenge offered by mentor-teachers to student teachers (Hoffman et al. 2015). It is possible for mentor-teachers to assume they are having democratic and collaborative mentoring conversations, when in practice this may not be the case (Orland-Barak and Klein 2005).

In a mixed methods study that included data from 177 student teachers, Wilson and Huynh (2020) found that student teachers who were described as having non-productive coping strategies reported being lonely and having problems communicating with their mentor-teacher. In the study, coping strategies considered to be non-productive included self-blaming, worrying and focusing on the negative. The student teachers who had trouble coping also described how they felt that guidance from their mentor-teacher was insufficient. Since work-based learning is such an influential part of teacher education, where student teachers gain an understanding of the complex work of teachers (Darling-Hammond 2014), the significance of the mentoring role is drawn into sharp focus:

Mentors also form part of the context within which a student teacher is more or less likely to engage in learning processes. As such, mentoring has the potential to either afford or constrain the student teachers’ workplace learning outcomes (Lofthouse and Thomas 2014, 203).

Thus, the quality of the interactions between student teachers and mentor-teachers can have a crucial influence on students’ learning (Izadinia 2015; Rozelle and Wilson 2012).

Study context

Mentoring student teachers in work-based learning is considered a bridge between theory and practice, and mentor-teachers are expected to guide student teachers in making this connection. Teacher education in Sweden for elementary and secondary education is divided into studies of school subjects (including mathematics education, Swedish education, English education, science education and social science education) and courses in educational sciences (e.g. educational psychology, curriculum theory, educational assessment and classroom management). The education is either eight (grades 4–6, pupils aged 10–12 years old) or nine (grades 7–9, pupils aged 13–15 years old) semesters long, and the student teachers complete 20 weeks of practical work-based learning distributed throughout the teacher education programme.

According to a national evaluation conducted by the Swedish higher education authority, there is a lack of teachers equipped to undertake mentoring tasks (UKÄ 2015). A mentor-teacher in Sweden is typically required to complete coursework on mentoring at a university before they can be considered a mentor-teacher. Mentor-teachers also receive instructional material about teacher education to aid with their mentoring. Orland-Barak (2002) describes how a university-based course for mentor-teachers can reveal dilemmas experienced by student teachers during their mentorship that might otherwise remain hidden. Nevertheless, studies have shown that such materials are interpreted and used in different ways by mentor-teachers (Sädbom et al. 2019). Although mentor-teachers do not make graded assessments, they do provide written evaluations of student teachers that inform the grading conducted at the university. The written evaluation forms vary between universities, but the course objectives for work-based learning follow the national curriculum for teacher education. Therefore, mentor-teachers commonly perform some sort of evaluation that considers a student’s suitability as a teacher (Lindqvist and Nordänger 2018).

Purpose

Against this backdrop, our study aimed to investigate mentor-teachers’ perceptions about how student teachers respond to emotional challenges. We were guided by the following research questions: (1) How do mentor-teachers perceive student teachers’ emotional challenges? (2) What reasons do they ascribe to these challenges? (3) What support do mentor-teachers perceive that they provide student teachers who are striving to cope with emotional challenges?

Methods

In this study, we adopted a qualitative research design based on a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Constructivist grounded theory is a suitable research approach when studying social processes, meaning and interaction, including participants’ perspectives (Charmaz 2014).

Ethical considerations

The study was granted ethical approval by the Regional Ethical Board in Sweden (Ref. no.: 2019–04099). The student teachers were informed about their rights as participants before data collection and that their participation was voluntarily. In addition, they were informed that their participation was confidential, and they were told how the data were to be used within the project. To uphold participant anonymity, measures were taken (e.g. all names and places were changed, and pseudonyms used where necessary in reported data and interview transcripts).

Data collection

For the study, 22 mentor-teachers (82% female; ages within the range 35–60 years; M = 47.63, SD = 5.71) were recruited via an email inviting participation in the study. The recruitment focused on aiming to reach a diverse range of mentor-teachers. The mentor-teachers represented schools with grades 4 to 6 (upper elementary school including pupils aged around 10–12 years), and 7 to 9 (lower secondary school including pupils aged around 13–15 years). The predominantly female sample is broadly reflective of the general predominance of female teachers in grades 4 to 6, and 7 to 9 in Sweden. The mentor-teachers in the current study taught different school subjects including mathematics, English, sloyd (i.e. crafts), and geography, among others. The schools where the mentor-teachers worked were situated in various different socioeconomic areas that included both rural and urban environments. The mentor-teachers came from five different municipalities and were assigned student teachers from three different universities. Most of the mentor-teachers had worked as a teacher for many years, with approximately between 10 and 30 years of experience (M = 20.04, SD = 5.67). All participants had acted as mentors for five years or more.

In the study, data were collected by way of interviews conducted by the first author. The interviewer aimed to sustain a non-judgemental approach and create an open climate of conversation through, for example, remaining attentive to participants’ tone of voice and facial expressions. He also returned to previous statements and used follow-up questions to demonstrate that he was curious about the participants’ perspectives, aiming to make them feel open to elaborating on their experiences (Hiller and Diluzio 2004). The interview guide was developed within the research group, following a previous study of mentor-teachers, and in relation to other studies that the authors have conducted with student teachers. The interview questions focused on (a) mentors’ views of student teachers’ emotional challenges in relation to teaching and relationships with pupils (for example, What emotional challenges do you think student teachers experience when teaching?), (b) what support they thought they could offer student teachers in emotionally challenging situations (for example, What support do you give student teachers experiencing challenges with teaching?), and (c) their own experiences of challenges as mentor-teachers (for example, What do you find challenging about being a mentor?). The interviews were conducted in Swedish, recorded and transcribed. The length of the interviews varied from 42 to 71 min (M = 52.63, SD = 9.75).

Data analyses

The study’s constructivist grounded theory approach meant that we focused on theory construction, using an abductive logic (Lindqvist and Forsberg 2023). In line with informed grounded theory, theoretical agnosticism and theoretical pluralism were guiding principles during theory construction (Thornberg 2012). When analysing the transcripts from the interviews, we therefore employed a constructivist grounded theory methodology, including coding procedure, constant comparison, theoretical sampling, memo writing and memo sorting (Charmaz 2014; Glaser 1978; Glaser and Strauss 1967).

The analyses procedure started with the use of initial coding (a), which involved creating provisional and modifiable labels that summarised brief segments of data, either word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence or segment-by-segment. By constantly comparing data with data, codes with data, codes with codes and codes with new data, the initial codes were clustered, developed and merged into more comprehensive codes. We then moved to focused coding (b), in which the most prevalent and interesting codes from the initial coding guided further data gathering and were used to analyse data (Charmaz 2014), to create definitions of the focused codes and elevate them into categories. The focused codes were constructed and tried out in constant comparison. Theoretical coding (c) was used more or less in parallel with focused coding, in order to try out relationships between the codes (Glaser 1978). Through theoretical coding, mentor-teachers’ perceptions of emotional challenges were connected to different theoretical code-families (Glaser 1978, 1998). The code-family used was process (Glaser 1978). During the different phases of analysis, the research group engaged in critical dialogue to enhance the trustworthiness of the coding. We discussed the analysis until consensus was reached.

Findings

Use of the analytical procedure described above allowed us to address the research questions and gain insight into the mentor-teachers’ perspectives on student teachers’ emotional challenges. The mentor-teachers discussed their assumption that emotionally challenging situations would be demanding for student teachers to navigate. They were particularly concerned that student teachers who continued to show signs of not being able to cope in situations where they were challenged, despite being supported, may find it difficult to get to grips with the role of teacher. The mentor-teachers referred to teaching as a complex practice, requiring differentiation in teaching to account for differences between pupils and engagement in relation to developing a professional teacher role. They reflected on why this might be challenging for student teachers.

In terms of process, the mentor-teachers perceived student teachers’ emotional challenges to be connected to engagement in developing a professional teaching role that was based on the need to demonstrate an adequate level of attention to the teaching situation and enact an appropriate relationship. In relation to adjusting teaching methods to allow for differentiation between pupils, mentor-teachers perceived this to be manifested through student teachers’ ability to interpret the situation and act with flexibility as a teacher.

It was evident from the analysis that the mentor-teachers considered both (i) student teachers’ engagement in developing a professional teacher role and (ii) student teachers’ adjustments in their teaching as important criteria when they evaluated the student teachers during their work-based learning – including consideration of their suitability for the profession in terms of how they managed emotional challenges. The relationships between these categories and sub-categories are presented in Figure 1, whilst the subsections below explore these in detail. Illustrative quotations from the data (translated into English) have been included, where helpful to illuminate main points.

Figure 1. Categories and sub-categories from the analysis.

(i) Mentor-teachers’ perspectives on student teachers’ engagement

The mentor-teachers in the study considered that student teachers’ participation in the work during regular school days was vital to work-based learning. They reported how most student teachers developed their skills and understanding over the weeks they spent in work-based learning. While they had all encountered student teachers who experienced challenges when participating, they felt that these challenges could be resolved during the work-based learning period. The mentor-teachers perceived that student teachers encountered emotional challenges related to engagement in developing a professional teacher role in two ways: firstly, demonstrating an adequate level of attention and secondly, enacting appropriate relationships.

In terms of demonstrating an adequate level of attention, the mentor-teachers in the study emphasised that the student teachers needed to be engaged in and committed to their learning situation, participating with enthusiasm in the school’s work. A central requirement, according to the mentor-teachers, was that student teachers must show an adequate level of commitment during work-based learning. As one mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) explained:

We have experienced student teachers who place really high demands on themselves. And we experienced student teachers who do not care at all. Complete opposites.

The mentor-teachers felt that when student teachers did not show appropriate levels of attention, it could easily result in emotionally challenging situations for them in their work-based learning. For example, student teachers who did not interact with, and establish relationships with pupils risked failing to engage pupils during lessons, resulting in off-task and disruptive pupil behaviours and, consequently, a lack of pupil learning. Another mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) described how failure to show interest in pupils could lead to challenges later on:

Yeah, you need to show an interest in getting to know others. We feel that it’s a requirement if you want to be a teacher, to know and respond to people around you. And [if] we felt that was not the case between [student teachers] and the pupils, or us as colleagues [...] that will be troublesome.

While student teachers who showed too little attention were considered problematic, student teachers who, on the other hand, displayed an excessive level of attention were perceived as being at risk of emotional challenges. These were, according to the mentor-teachers, student teachers who paid disproportionate levels of attention to their own performance in helping pupils and had too high an expectation of their own impact. This, in turn, complicated the mentoring task. For instance, a mentor-teacher of grades 7–9 observed as follows:

Yeah, exactly. They take it personally. Like, ‘I was bad; I didn’t explain this clearly enough’, or ‘my planning was bad’. Like they take it personally.

The mentor-teachers wanted the student teachers to have realistic expectations. They described how, through their mentoring, they made the student teachers aware of the issues relating to paying excessive or inadequate attention. The mentor-teachers reported that they took actions to guide student teachers into a more realistic level of everyday level of engagement with pupils, their own performance and other aspects connected to their work as a teacher. Moreover, the mentor-teachers used strategies to promote increased attention among student teachers who demonstrated too little, and made efforts to decrease an excessive level of attention to detail among those whom they felt focused too much on pupils and their own performance. Mentor-teachers were, thus, concerned about guiding student teachers to show adequate, realistic, levels of attention: this was also one of their key criteria when informally evaluating student teachers’ suitability.

As mentioned above, the mentor-teachers also perceived that student teachers encountered emotional challenges related to enacting appropriate relationships. Establishing an appropriate relationship with pupils is essential in teachers’ work (Frelin 2015). The participants described how some student teachers experienced emotional challenges with establishing a professional relationship with pupils. The mentor-teachers perceived that it could be emotionally challenging for students to develop an appropriate relationship as a professional teacher, which was different from being a young, friendly student teacher. This distinction was described by one mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) as a challenge for student teachers:

To be able to have a relationship with the pupils, how you do that, well listen but be firm. Show that you are an adult, dare to be an adult. I try to, this is how you are someone’s security. The pupils are in school a lot of time and we teachers could have a big impact, both good and bad. So, be a safe adult that the pupils feel, well, like a second home.

One of the other mentor-teachers (grades 4–6) referred to student teachers who had difficulties acting like a professional teacher in their interactions and relationships with pupils during their work-based learning, arguing that if student teachers were shy or failed to behave as a professional teacher, they would not learn to assume the necessary and adequate role of a professional teacher. Instead, this mentor-teacher thought they would encounter numerous emotional challenges:

No, that is very individual. I might have been lucky, if I may use that term, that I have had students that have worked in schools a lot of years before they started studying. They have been substitutes and stuff like that, so they come with something. But if you come straight from upper secondary school, I don’t think it’s easy. And we have had some students who have been really quiet, and then they also had a hard time finding an adult role in this context, and then it’s really hard to teach.

Demonstrating teacher authority, including maintaining a professional distance towards pupils, was regarded as necessary to becoming an effective teacher who could create a positive classroom climate conducive for learning. For example, another mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) observed how student teachers sometimes struggled with the tension between being a peer-like friend on the one hand and a professional teacher on the other in their interactions with pupils, explaining that student teachers who acted more as a peer-like friend of pupils may be more concerned with wanting to be liked by the pupils:

I think there is a strong wish to be liked and then you want to be more of a friend, well, you want to be liked. But I have also learned from encountering this, so I [… .] explain that you can never back away from that [being a friend]. If you go in and be their friend and don’t establish ‘this is what I expect’ and clear boundaries, then it’s very hard to do differently later./ … /So, I’ve learned to be explicit with this before the work-based learning period starts. That is important for me too, to experience students who haven’t worked at all, so I better know more about what advice to give before the students start.

This mentor-teacher believed that such an approach prevented student teachers from being effective teachers during their work-based learning. The wish to encourage student teachers to reflect upon, and be wary of, the relationships they stepped into during their work-based learning occasioned this interview participant to think about the mentoring role as a way of positively influencing student teachers.

(ii) Mentor-teachers’ perspectives on student teachers’ teaching adjustments

Student teachers are sometimes unfamiliar with how varied a class of pupils might be: for example, in terms of ability. According to Fantilli and McDougall (2009), encountering a diverse pupil population might create challenges for new teachers starting their careers. In our study, all mentor-teachers described examples of how student teachers tended to focus initially on their own performance instead of on the pupils’ responses and abilities (see Flores and Day 2006). They argued that student teachers experienced emotional challenges in their work-based learning when they encountered pupil diversity and were unable to adjust, or differentiate their teaching to meet the pupils’ needs. The mentor-teachers emphasised that student teachers must learn how to make these teaching adjustments to allow for differentiation between pupils – i.e. taking measures to plan and carry out the teaching to meet each pupil’s individual learning needs in the classroom. When the mentor-teachers further explained what types of teaching adjustments were needed, they described two concerns regarding the challenges faced by student teachers when they conducted their teaching: interpreting the situation and acting with flexibility. The mentor-teachers believed that student teachers needed to learn and demonstrate these two key teacher skills. Without them, their teaching efforts were thought to lead to pupil disengagement and misconduct in the classroom, a lack of learning and feelings of failure.

When it comes to interpreting the situation, Flores and Day (2006) observe that novice teachers progress through phases, from being occupied with their own performance and not noticing the reactions of the pupils, to being more attuned to pupils’ needs. One mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) highlighted how student teachers could be too concerned with following a lesson plan, which may lead to a failure to understand why a situation occurred in a classroom. This mentor-teacher made clear that drawing on one’s own experience could be helpful in this regard when working with student teachers:

I usually explain that it happens to me too. Despite my [many] years in the business, you must be prepared to re-think and explain in a new way or take a step back or just repeat, or whatever it takes.

This mentor-teacher further described that these unexpected interruptions were emotionally challenging and difficult for student teachers to cope with, arguing that the role of the mentor-teacher included helping student teachers understand the nature of the teaching profession. This was a common way of thinking among mentor-teachers: if they showed the student teachers that they, as experienced teachers, also encountered emotional challenges in certain situations, they assumed that student teachers might be able to lower their overly high expectations of what they thought they could do.

Similarly, another participant (grades 4–6) explained that modelling teaching and showing student teachers teaching adjustments, including interpreting the situation, were necessary techniques which could have a crucial impact on the way that lessons went. This mentor-teacher explained how, instead of being completely preoccupied with executing a lesson exactly as planned, student teachers must learn to be sensitive to each pupil and what is going on in the classroom, differentiating their ongoing teaching accordingly. By doing that, student teachers could learn to see what they could improve instead of simply thinking that they had failed to accomplish the planned lesson.

One mentor-teacher (grades 7–9) felt that teaching was further complicated by the fact that student teachers were standing in front of the pupil group, whilst not familiar with them or certain pupils’ special needs:

The biggest challenge is that they don’t know the group and might not be able to read it. They focus too much on themselves. It’s a big thing for them, how they are perceived and what they do, and how they are judged. They think that is really difficult, so I think that is the biggest challenge.

This mentor-teacher referred to the use of informal criteria when evaluating student teachers regarded as possibly unsuitable, noticing that when a student teacher had another idea about teaching, it challenged the mentor-teacher’s own notion of the ideal way of dealing with an emotionally challenging episode. This draws attention to mentor-teachers’ own subjective interpretation of teacher ideals and professional competence (see Lanas and Kelchtermans 2015).

In classrooms, it is common for unplanned situations to occur that need to be addressed, or for teaching segments to take more time than had been planned for. According to the mentor-teachers, this meant that student teachers needed to learn to act with flexibility in relation to their pre-planning and the present classroom. According to the mentor-teachers, acting with flexibility was dependent on how well the students interpreted the situation and how well they managed to differentiate their teaching in the moment to meet the needs of a group. Such flexibility demanded a preparedness for action, and willingness to give up previous plans and be responsive to the situation. For example, one mentor-teacher (grades 4–6) described how a common emotional challenge among students experiencing an unexpected event created a feeling of poor performance in front of the mentor-teacher:

You have a plan that is a good plan for a lesson. You know what to go through, but then something might take twice as long time as you have planned, and then you must reconsider it for the next lesson, or you might even cut something out. You must be flexible. There’s no prestige in doing everything you have planned in detail, but the main thing is to have a structure planned and see ‘where are the pupils going’ and have time for that. Then, like I said, things happen during the lesson that make you prioritise your thoughts. But we talk a bit about how that, but you grow as a teacher if you must face problems and confront worries. It’s not supposed to go smoothly all the time.

This mentor-teacher considered it a valuable lesson for student teachers to encounter emotional challenges, regarding them as opportunities for learning. Indeed, this was something discussed elsewhere – by another grade 4–6 mentor-teacher:

Yes, well that’s also something that comes after a while. I think they’ll go through some trial and error. They get to discover that it’s hard to plan lessons. They also discover that you don’t always get around to doing all you’ve planned. What do you do then? Well, then we have to re-plan and do that the next lesson. It’s flexibility that is necessary for teachers. They must discover that. I can’t tell them that as a teacher or a mentor–teacher. That must come from the inside. That they realise you must be flexible, you must be able to back off, you must be able to rush forward.

The process of developing the ability to act with flexibility was assumed to happen when student teachers faced problems, and through trial and error. In the quotation above, the mentor-teacher is trying to understand it from the student teachers’ viewpoint. In addition, a further participant (grades 4–6) described having a proactive approach and emphasising the importance of flexibility early on in mentoring conversations:

It’s a huge part of the work, to be flexible and re-think, and ‘now I do this because this happened’. You must talk about that, because otherwise it will be difficult for the students when they start working out in the real world. I absolutely think you should talk about that a lot.

A grounded theory of the mentor-teachers’ perspectives

According to the mentor-teachers, student teachers needed to demonstrate engagement in developing a professional role and differentiate their teaching to become full members of the teaching community. When the students seemed unable to enact appropriate professional relationships or make suitable adjustments to their teaching, it was assumed that they would be likely to experience emotional challenges on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, the mentor-teachers perceived that this could indicate lack of suitability for the teaching profession. Mentor-teachers observed, were concerned about, and evaluated student teachers’ engagement (i.e. their ability to show an adequate level of attention and enact an appropriate relationship with pupils) and teaching adjustments (interpreting the situation and acting with flexibility).

The mentor-teachers’ descriptions of student teachers’ emotional challenges were made in relation to an ‘ideal’ visualisation of what it means to be a successful teacher. The mentor-teachers portrayed engagement in developing a professional role and capability to differentiate their teaching as pivotal and essential if they were to deal with emotional challenges. Those student teachers who did show engagement in developing a professional role and were able to make teaching adjustments were considered to be ‘full’ members of the professional teaching community, although they were still student teachers. They were regarded as an asset in the classroom and someone with whom the mentor-teacher could explore the teacher profession. In contrast, the student teachers who were unable, over time, to attain appropriate engagement in developing a professional role and differentiate their teaching were considered to have a long way to go before they could become part of the teaching community.

Discussion

Our study investigated mentor-teachers’ perceptions of how student teachers respond to emotional challenges. The mentor-teachers described what they considered to be necessary qualities to attain and maintain a position as a teacher. According to Lindqvist and Nordänger (2018), unsuitable behaviours perceived by mentor-teachers included being passive and inflexible, and lacking in self-awareness. Similarly, the participants in the current study emphasised proactive engagement in developing a professional role, and flexibility, as important characteristics of student teachers.

More broadly, it is, of course, possible that mentor-teachers’ dominant ideas about how student teachers should respond when facing emotional challenges could impede their ideal of establishing mentoring as a reflective practice (Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen 2014; Hobson 2016). In other words, it could come across as merely presenting established statements such as ‘think about who you are teaching’. There is a risk that the visualisation of an ‘ideal teacher’ might create a set of informal norms that mentor-teachers use when evaluating student teachers. It must be borne in mind that our study described mentor-teachers’ perceptions of the suitability of student teachers not only in relation to set protocols from teacher education, as described by Sädbom et al. (2019).

In situations where mentor-teachers perceive too large a gap between a student teacher’s actions on the one hand and their own ideals of what a professional teacher looks like on the other, there may be a more pronounced risk of ‘judgementoring’ (see Hobson 2016). For example, a mentor who constantly comments about what a student teacher should do might enforce the power imbalance between the student teacher and mentor-teacher (Lilach 2020). In such a situation, the student teacher might attempt to adjust their response in a superficial manner, merely to try to satisfy the demands of the mentor-teacher (see Orland-Barak and Klein 2005). Thus, the most reasonable-seeming action for a student teacher to take might appear to be to remain compliant with the mentor-teacher, much like the face-saving activities described by Bjørndal (2020).

An implication of our study is that there may be ways of developing the role of the mentor-teacher to further enhance student teachers’ learning from classroom experiences. This could include, for example, more explicit dialogues with student teachers about emotional challenges and how they might be addressed. These kinds of professional interactions might support student teachers to navigate situations that they encounter as novice teachers and find ways of coping with adversity that are contextual, social and sustainable.

Limitations

In this small-scale study, the data are based on interviews with mentor-teachers who described their perceptions of student teachers’ emotional challenges and reflected on how they mentored them in relation to these perceived challenges. We were interested in this because people’s perspectives of situations will affect and guide their attitudes and actions in these situations (Charmaz 2014; Charon 2001). However, this meant that the identity development of the student teachers was not a focus of this study, and we were not able to follow the student teachers over several periods of work-based learning. It is important to acknowledge that we do not know whether the mentoring teachers’ assessments of suitability led to changes in the student teachers’ repertoires in addressing issues of engagement and differentiated teaching.

In addition, the present findings are based on a sample of Swedish mentor-teachers: mentoring and support systems vary widely across teacher education settings internationally. Nevertheless, and in line with a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2014), the study offers an interpretative portrayal and not an exact representation of mentor-teachers’ experiences. Our findings are partial, contextual, provisional and fallible interpretations and approximations. Therefore, we do not assert generalisation, but rather argue that our findings’ transferability can be interpreted and discussed by readers in terms of possible pattern recognition and context similarity (Larsson 2009).

Conclusions

The work-based learning component of any initial teacher education programme is crucial and often demanding for the student teacher. During this time, the relationship between mentor-teacher and student teacher is pivotal to the quality of the learning experienced. From previous research, we know student teachers sometimes find this learning to be emotionally challenging (Lindqvist et al. 2017). This study offers insight into mentor-teachers’ perceptions of student teachers’ emotional challenges, including what mentor-teachers considered to be key in relation to the professional skills that the student teachers need to build: engagement in developing a professional role and capability to adjust their teaching to allow for differentiation between pupils. The findings could be used as a starting point to consider ways that the role of the mentor-teacher could be further developed to support student teachers as they embark on the important early stages of their pre-service teaching journeys.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from Swedish Research Council [Grant number: 2018-04098].