School quality matters: how mentoring can be restructured to support beginning teachers in different schools from a social capital perspective

ABSTRACT

This study qualitatively and exploratively investigates mentoring for four beginning teachers from four schools with different levels of quality, as defined by the local education authority, to explore whether school quality positively correlates with the effectiveness of mentoring from a social capital perspective. We found that beginning teachers in high-quality schools are more likely to obtain effective mentoring than their colleagues working in disadvantaged and ordinary schools because they have more significant opportunities to obtain high-quality social capital through mentoring networks. This study proposes a regional support system for restructuring mentoring to support beginning teachers in different schools. Several insights that emerge from the results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Beginning teacher
• mentoring
• school quality
• disadvantaged school
• teacher professional development
• social capital

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank all the educational administrators and principals who helped us collect data and the teachers who participated in this research. We extend our most heartfelt respect and gratitude to all the anonymous reviewers, editors, and editorial managers of Research Papers in Education who have read our manuscript very seriously, responsibly, and professionally and spent much energy and time giving us valuable comments, suggestions, and editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Group-run schools mean that several schools shape an education group in which high-quality schools help improve disadvantaged schools.

2. Free Teacher Education (FTE) has been a monetary incentive teacher education programme in China since 2007 that aims to bridge the educational inequality between rural and urban regions. The entrants to this programme enjoy some financial and teaching job opportunity privileges, and they must teach in the elementary or middle schools in their home provinces for at least six years after graduation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China’s “14th five-year plan” general research project on education in 2021: Research on the logic of changes in teaching research institutions with Chinese characteristics and the evidence-based development path of teaching research staff since the founding of the Communist Party of China [grant number BHA210128]. This research is funded by the “International Exchange Program for Post-doctoral Researchers.”

Notes on contributors

Xiaoyan Li

Xiaoyan Li received her PhD from the School of Education, The University of New South Wales (UNSW), and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Teacher Education Research, Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include teacher education, educational leadership, and school improvement.

Litao Lu

Litao Lu is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. He has published extensively on curriculum studies, teacher education, and school improvement issues.