Exploring descriptions of mentoring as support in Swedish preschools

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to knowledge about mentoring in preschool, which is important as research on mentoring of preschool teachers is limited. The study examines how in-service preschool teachers perceive their assignment as a mentor. The aim is to develop the understanding of mentoring as support among pre-school teacher mentors in Swedish preschools (children’s age 1–5). The data consists of 75 in-service preschool teachers’ self-reflective texts from a university mentoring course. A phenomenographic approach was adopted and three qualitatively different categories were identified. Mentoring as support was experienced as: mentoring as personal, professional and team support. Apart from the finding that the mentor’s role is complex, the preschool settings present other challenges and place different demands on the mentor because they comprise a team including preschool teachers, childcare attendants and parents, when compared to their counterparts in compulsory school settings. The paper has implications for how to reflect on and problematize concepts of mentoring, and it could also have an impact on mentoring in school, on mentoring education, and on induction programmes internationally. Mentor support for professional practices directed at team building should influence early childhood teacher preparation for pre-and in-service teachers.

Introduction

This study addresses the question of how preschool teachers working as mentors in preschools perceive their assignment. In recent decades, an increasing number of teachers across the world are leaving the profession – a particularly common phenomenon among newly qualified teachers. Research shows that new teachers are less successful with, for example, social relations with students, peers and families, than teachers who have more experience (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2006; Rice, 2010), and that better induction programmes with mentor support can reduce this trend (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011; Kemmis et al., 2014b; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004; Strong, Villar, & Fletcher, 2008). Mentoring can assist new teachers in positioning themselves within a school community, and help them to handle the initial difficulties and challenges of the profession (Fransson & Gustafsson, 2012).

In Sweden before 2011, mentoring and induction programmes were for newly employed graduated teachers of pupils aged 6–19, and preschool teachers of children aged 1–5, but the programmes varied in frequency and implementation depending on the policies of different providers of education, i.e., municipal or independent schools.¹ Where mentoring did occur in schools, it was mostly carried out unsystematically, individually and on the basis of the mentor’s personal experience and the mentee’s personal needs. Mentors were normally experienced colleagues within the same school (for pupils aged 6–19) who had a strong commitment to the profession. However, in preschools, the collegial work tradition has always been very strong so, regarding mentoring, the whole work team had responsibility for introducing new colleagues, often in an informal way. In Sweden, attendance at preschool is voluntary for children aged one to five years, although 83% of children attend. The Swedish parliament and government set out the goals and guidelines for preschools in the Education Act (SFS, 2010:800) and the curriculum (Lpfö, 1998). There are two categories of educational staff: preschool teachers with 3.5 years of higher education (bachelor’s degree) and child care attendants with 6–12 months’ education at upper secondary level. Preschool teachers and child care attendants work together in teams. The principal of each school/preschool is responsible for the induction programme and the designation of mentors (SFS, 2010:800; SKOLFS 2014:417).

In March 2011, the Swedish parliament introduced teacher “licenses”, which meant that newly qualified preschool teachers and school teachers had to participate in a one-year induction programme with mentor support before receiving their certification. The purpose of the reform was to raise the profession’s status, increase recruitment and create a bridge between teacher education and professional practice. By 2011, a university in Sweden had started developing a course of mentoring called Mentorship in Preschool and School (7.5 The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, ECTS credits) in order to meet the requirements of the reform. The students were in-service teachers and preschool teachers, and most of them had experience of mentoring teacher students, where they acted as a supervisor, observing performance and formally assessing the mentee at the end of the mentorship period. This new injunction changed the mentoring practice in Swedish preschools from informal team-mentoring with the input of both preschool teachers and child care attendants, to formal individual mentoring by preschool teachers in what Kemmis, Heikkinen, Fransson, Aspfors, and Edwards-Groves (2014a) describe as mentoring as support, where an experienced teacher works individually with a new teacher to support their professional development. In this kind of mentoring process, the relationship is not supervisory and a large part of the focus is on well-being. The mentor seeks to be a helpful professional colleague and guide, and the mentee seeks continuous professional development.

The first motive behind our study relates to the lack of studies on how this 2011 policy change in Sweden – when mentorship became mandatory and formal – influenced mentoring and mentor education. Secondly, a study on preschool teachers is warranted due to the change in their mentoring practice because of this policy change, and due to the relatively few international studies available about mentoring in preschool. Thirdly, due to previous research by Kemmis et al. (2014a) about the archetype of mentoring as support among teachers in Swedish schools (for pupils aged 6–19), we focus on supportive mentoring experiences in Swedish preschool education.

There are many aspects to conducting mentoring in educational settings, such as an informal or formal process. There are also several perspectives on the concept of mentoring, such as the mentee’s or mentor’s perspective. The point of departure in this article is to take the conceptualization of mentoring as a formal process, in which a qualified and experienced preschool teacher “supports” a newly qualified preschool teacher’s professional development. This study focuses on how the mentor perceives their own role in the mentoring process.

The aim of the paper is to further develop the understanding of mentoring as support (Kemmis et al., 2014a) among pre-school teachers in the national context of Sweden, since research on mentoring by preschool teachers is limited. We ask what different ways of experiencing mentoring as support can be discerned in in-service preschool teachers’ self-reflective texts.

Aspects of mentoring

The following literature review is focused on various aspects of mentoring in different settings, but mostly on newly qualified schoolteachers. The ages and levels of the mentees differ. The aspects are: Informal and formal mentoring, Mentoring relationships, and Archetypes and Mentoring Styles. The literature review ends with a section about mentoring in preschools.

Informal and formal mentoring

Copeland and Calhoun (2014) examine mentees’ perceptions of being mentored by female superintendents. Their point of departure is that the mentees’ experiences could be both formal and informal. Informal mentoring is defined as a mentoring relationship that develops spontaneously without any assistance (Dunbar & Kinnersley, 2011). Formal mentoring is described as a mentoring relationship that results from a structured mentoring programme containing specific criteria for implementation. The results of the interviews in that study, however, lead to a very different understanding of formal and informal mentoring experiences; the participants describe formal mentoring as being more structured and purposeful, where the contact happens around an agreed set of issues and formal meeting times, while informal mentoring is more spontaneous with less structure and where there is a level of comfort between mentor and mentee. In addition, positive relations between mentor and mentee are seen as important, as in the research of Alsbury and Hackmann (2006). Although this is an interesting study regarding the conception of informal and formal mentoring, it is especially relevant, as preschool mentoring in Sweden has changed from informal to formal. However, the data from the previous studies mainly consist of the mentees’ perceptions and not those of the mentors. Meanwhile, Roberts (2000) conceptualizes mentoring as an informal process, a formalized process, a helping process, and a career-development process. From this perspective, mentoring is a “formalised process, whereby a more knowledgeable and experienced person actuates a supportive role of overseeing, encouraging reflection, and learning within a less experienced and knowledgeable person, to facilitate that person’s career and development” (p. 162). This definition of mentoring is very relevant to this study, though it fails to consider that the mentee may actually be more knowledgeable than the mentor. The newly qualified preschool teacher is likely to have a more thorough theoretical and up-to-date education than the mentor – a discrepancy that may have some implications for the mentoring process.

Mentoring relationships

Wang and Odell (2007) recognize the challenges and complications related to moving novice teachers toward a reform-minded style of teaching. According to Wang and Odell (2007), reform-minded teaching supports the active construction of students’ knowledge in various subject contents and relies on curriculum standards. It can be consistent with critical pedagogy, where social justice and democratic values are dominant. Reform-minded teaching differs from the assumption that learning is the individual student’s mastery of isolated facts and concepts through a prearranged and controlled sequence. In their study, they conceptualize 16 different categories of mentor-mentee relationships based on critical constructivist and social cultural perspectives of learning. The categories describe the variations that occur when mentors and mentees have similar or divergent views about mentoring and teaching. The researchers identify three major underlying theoretical perspectives: humanistic, situated apprentice, and critical constructivist.

From the humanistic perspective, the fundamental goal of the mentor is to assist mentees by dealing with the praxis shock and psychological anxiety of personal and professional demands. In practice, the mentor adopts the role of a counselor within a harmonious personal relationship with the mentee. From this perspective, it is assumed that mentors’ emotional and psychological support is required in order for the mentee to identify and resolve conflicts, establish self-esteem, and develop confidence – all of which help the mentee become an effective teacher. However, this perspective leaves learning how to actually teach to the mentees themselves.

From the situated apprentice perspective, the major goal is to help new teachers connect their university coursework with classroom teaching, i.e., the connection between theory and practice. The mentor is an expert with a strong and contextualized knowledge of teaching, who assists the novice teacher in developing practical knowledge and teaching methods. Thus, this perspective does not focus on the kind of teaching knowledge developed by thorough reflection, and goes against research findings that suggest the existing culture requires transformation on the part of the new teacher. The risk is, however, that mentors “pilot” new teachers through a teaching task. The concept of piloting is discussed by Lundgren (1989) and means that students – in this case, new teacher mentees – are guided through tasks in such a way that they can handle it, even though they do not really understand them on their own. Mentees’ competence to manage the teaching task itself, therefore, increases very little and the risk is that new teachers adapt to the existing context without thorough reflection.

From the critical constructivist perspective, the goal of the mentor is to serve as an agent of change. Mentoring from this perspective is about critiquing existing knowledge, structures, and the culture of teaching, and to work collaboratively to adapt such knowledge for a reform-minded teaching. This mentoring perspective focuses on assisting the mentee to develop and refine teaching methods.

Wang and Odell’s (ibid) examination of the three conceptions of mentoring leads them to conclude that none fully addresses the complicated processes of learning to teach. Since their study does not focus on mentors’ beliefs about learning and teaching, this previous research (Wang & Odell, 2007) can be used to see if these categories are consistent and congruent with our analysis of mentors’ perceptions of their supportive mission as mentors.

Archetypes and mentoring styles

Kemmis et al. (2014a) examine practices of mentoring in Australia, Finland and Sweden. They draw on a variety of studies and find three archetypes of mentoring: supervision, support, and collaborative self-development. All these three archetypes have different purposes and seek to attain different ends. In practice, mentoring can consist of components from more than one of the archetypes.

1. Mentoring as supervision sees the process as the preparation of new teachers, so that they can meet the requirements of being fully qualified, autonomous members of the profession. The mentor observes, reflects on and assesses the mentee’s performance.

2. Mentoring as support is seen as a process of professional support and guidance for a new teacher, in which a mentor assists the mentee in adapting to their role and the professional practices. The mentor understands the role of mentoring as sensitively and tactfully observing, supporting, challenging and occasionally advising the mentee, but the relationship is not supervisory. Instead, a large part of the focus is on well-being. The mentor seeks to be a helpful professional colleague and guide, and the mentee seeks continuous professional development. Sometimes, a mentor also observes the mentee teaching or working in other settings in the school.

3. Mentoring as collaborative self-development is seen as a process that assists a new teacher in becoming a member of a professional community, where members dialogue as equals to further their individual and collective development. An experienced teacher performs the role of facilitator in meetings of groups of new teachers. The intention behind these meetings is to provide a forum in which new teachers can confidentially discuss their teaching in a “safe” environment with their peers. The facilitator is not supposed to “tune” the performances of the other participants, but rather help to manage the flow of discussion and reflection and may occasionally offer advice if it seems appropriate.

Other scholars (Langhout, Rhodes, & Osborne, 2004) examine different degrees of support, structure, and activity in mentoring and evaluate their varying influence on adolescent mentees. The mentees in their study are 1,138 youths aged from ten to sixteen, who were followed for eighteen months. The results are based on the mentees’ perceptions of support, structure, and activity. The researchers identify four different mentoring styles:

• Moderate mentors are conditionally supportive and show moderate levels of activity and structure.

• Unconditionally supportive mentors are described as giving the highest levels of support.

• Active mentors offer the highest number of activities, but very little structure.

• Low-key mentors provide the lowest level of activity, but still high support.

Langhout et al. (2004) find that mentees generally benefit most regarding social, psychological and academic outcomes from the moderate mentoring style with a conditional amount of support and a moderate level of activities. Although the data are derived from the mentees’ point of view, whereas this study focuses on the mentors’ perspective, this study is large and empirically distinguishes a variety of mentoring styles and relationships between the mentor and the mentee that might have important implications for the mentoring process.

Mentoring in preschools

Even though the majority of the research reviewed above is about mentoring newly qualified schoolteachers, there is some research on supporting preschool teachers. Mayer and Nolan (2008) early work in Australia underlines the importance of successful models of mentoring. Walkington (2005) investigates preschool teachers´ perceptions of what mentoring adds to their personal and professional self-concept, which is consistent with the work of Hobson and colleagues (Hobson et al., 2009). Walkington (2005) also finds that there is a need to give enhanced importance to understanding the mentors’ motivation, as they, too, are learners through their relationship with mentees. Regarding the role of the mentor, many preschool mentors perceive the role more in terms of supervision rather than mentoring (Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1992). Ambrosetti and Dekkers (2010) identify the most prominent factors in the mentor’s role as: 1. supporting the mentee, 2. providing feedback as an adept professional, 3. providing encouragement and sharing ideas, and 4. demonstrating how to proceed in different teaching situations. As for support, the authors find that mentoring is seen as being mostly about supporting the mentee in various instructional situations.

Method

The mentorship of preschool teachers was studied using qualitative method. Descriptions of the data collection strategy and method of analysis are presented below.

Data collection

As mentioned in the introduction, a university in Sweden had developed a 10-week course in mentoring by the time of the 2011 reform. The course was called Mentorship in Preschool and School and had 7.5 ECTS credits, which was on university graduate level. A minimum of two years’ professional teaching experience was required for admission to the course. It was designed to help teachers and preschool teachers carry out their mentoring assignment in line with the reform’s purpose.

Since 2012, the majority of the participants have been in-service preschool teachers. The preschool teachers vary in terms of age and experience in the profession (2–20 years) and type of preschool, but not in terms of gender since almost all preschool teachers in Sweden are women.

The data set was based on students written examination papers for the course. For the analysis, 75 texts were selected from preschool teacher mentors, detailing their personal experiences of mentoring. The authors chose these texts because they represented a broad and varied experience of mentoring. The texts enabled the mentors to explain and develop their experiences of mentoring without being affected and interrupted by the researcher’s interview questions, though one limitation is that it was not possible to ask follow-up questions. The texts were collected in three cohorts from five different groups with the same examination task in 2013–2014.

From a holistic point of view, choosing examination papers as a basis for analysis is not a simple task, because content can be influenced by the assessment criteria. The examination that was used consisted of two parts: first, the mentors had to describe their mentoring activity based on specific situations they had experienced in relation to their mentees. Secondly, the mentors analyzed and problematized their mentorship in relation to the course literature. In order to avoid influence from the assessment criteria, the analysis only applied to the first part of the examination, in which the participants freely described situations they had experienced and how they had supported new preschool teachers in their professional development. This part of the examination had not been formally assessed by the university and consisted of 1000– 1500 words. After the examination and the course were completed, the participants were asked if their examination texts could be used for research purposes. They were informed about the aim of the research, that their data would be kept anonymous, and how the results would be disseminated. 75 out of 90 participants agreed.

Data analysis

In line with the research question, the objective was to identify and describe qualitatively different ways in which mentoring as support are experienced and conceived by preschool mentors. The analysis of the data was done by a phenomenographic method (Marton, 1981), which drew on the epistemological idea that humans experience phenomena in qualitatively different ways, depending on their experiences. In other words, the idea is that the same phenomenon can be seen in qualitatively different ways and, because of our experience, it can be attributed different meanings (Marton & Booth, 1997). This means that a single person does not necessarily have only one way of experiencing a phenomenon. The aim of phenomenographical analysis is, therefore, to identify and describe different ways of experiencing a phenomenon; it is not to capture any particular individual’s understanding, but the full range of understandings within a group. The interpretation in this study, therefore, is based on the content of the texts as a whole, not as a series of individual texts. This means that the interpretation or categorization of an individual text cannot be fully understood without a sense of the group of texts as a whole.

Marton (1994) postulates that a phenomenon can only be understood as we experience or conceptualize it, which is a worldview where it is impossible to separate the one who is describing the world from the world being described. Our experiences as humans, therefore, depend on the practices in which we take part. Given that humans can only develop a limited number of experiences of a certain phenomenon mostly a limited category can be found in an analysis. If the aim is, as in this study, to discern the qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon can be described, phenomenography can be considered a meaningful approach (Marton, 1994).

The analysis consisted of a coder reliability check, where the two researchers independently read and coded all texts and compared categorizations; and a dialogic reliability check, where agreement between the researchers was reached through discussion and mutual critique of the data and of each researcher’s interpretive hypotheses (Åkerlind, 2012).

The process contained five steps, the first of which was to read the texts individually several times to ensure familiarity with the material. The second step was to identify the mentors’ statements about mentoring as support. Significant or unusual elements in their answers were highlighted. In the third step, themes were preliminarily classified and grouped together. In the fourth step, statements were contrasted against each other in a comparative analysis to discern patterns of similarity and difference in the text and conceptions that could be distinguished. The different ways of experiencing mentoring were captured in terms of categories of description, which can be seen as complementary in the sense that they have interconnected relationships and describe qualitative differences in how preschool teachers experience mentoring (Marton, 1981, 1994). In the fifth and final step, the categories of description were named.

The results of the analyzes are presented in qualitative separate categories, with descriptions and significant quotes to define their respective perceptions. These categories together constitute the study’s “outcome space” (Marton & Booth, 1997). Three separate categories were identified: mentoring as personal support, mentoring as professional support and mentoring as team support. It should be emphasized that the analysis and the “outcome space” cover the variation of perceptions throughout all examination texts, even though the results do not contain quotes from all texts. In addition, individual mentors may have expressed several perceptions.

Since phenomenographical research aims to explore a range of different ways of experiencing a phenomenon within a group, the frequency of utterances in each category has not been taken into consideration. Although, looking at the results as a whole, the category of mentoring as personal support was the most prominent category.

Results

Ways of experiencing mentoring as support

In the following section, the results of the phenomenographical-inspired analysis are presented. As mentioned above, the “outcome space” consists of three qualitatively distinct categories: mentoring as personal support, mentoring as professional support and mentoring as team support.

Mentoring as personal support

The first conception includes statements indicating that mentoring as support is perceived as personal support. The mentorship is focused on supporting the mentee’s development, based on the mentee’s own needs and interests. The mentor asks open-ended questions in order to get the mentee to talk about how s/he is experiencing the profession, and thinks it is important not to propose solutions, but to provide feedback on the mentee’s questions, experiences and solutions. The idea of mentoring as personal support also includes asking questions that challenge the mentee’s conceptions. The mentor listens actively, is sensitive to body language and tone levels, wants to avoid stress and pressure, and gives the mentee enough time for her/his thoughts and reflections.

I have learned to give the mentee time to come up with her own solutions, ask open-ended questions, dare to challenge and ask uncomfortable questions. It is about listening and letting the mentee decide conditions and tempo. Finally, respecting that the new preschool teacher has her own values and that mentoring is about learning, not obeying. It’s the new preschool teacher who is responsible and who makes the decisions.

As mentor, I support the creativity of the new preschool teacher, which means that the mentee has to be responsible and aware of her/his goals. It is important to listen to, understand and ratify support for what is in focus.

I provide the ´right´ questions and summaries from me of what she actually said, give her the opportunity to twist and turn her problems and find different solutions depending on whose perspective she adopts.

Mentoring as personal support strives to create a relationship based on security and trust, so the mentee feels comfortable addressing the issues and problems she/he wants to discuss. The mentor feels the need to familiarize her/himself with the mentee’s needs and interests, in order to provide better assistance.

It is important to build a good, stable and trusting relationship. The relationship will make her feel safer and help her to relax and overcome her fear.

It is my job to conceive, interpret and understand what the new preschool teacher would potentially need during her/his introduction year.

The mentor tries to comprehend how the mentee conceives various situations and challenges. One example of this is to understand the mentee’s potential sense of failure and loneliness, and to strive to recollect how the mentor experienced her/his own first year in the profession. The mentor tries to help the mentee deal with potential uncertainties and supports her/him in living with new, uncontrollable situations. The task for the mentor is to help the mentee build confidence in the profession and to convey a sense of optimism.

I try to put myself in her position in order to understand her anxiety and fear.

I want to help her turn her frustration into job satisfaction. I want to help her see opportunities instead of obstacles and constraints/ … /We must talk about the profession’s positive sides and why we applied for preschool teacher education and became teachers.

Mentoring as professional support

The second conception includes statements indicating that mentor as support is perceived as professional support. The mentorship is prescriptive, and the mentor supports the mentee by providing instructions and showing how situations can be handled. The mentor sees her/himself as a knowledgeable and experienced preschool teacher who wants to transfer and share her/his knowledge and experiences with the mentee. She/he dominates conversations by giving advice and concrete proposals and exemplifies how to solve situations. She/he also explains what is expected of a preschool teacher and a child care attendant in different situations by clarifying formal requirements and unspoken expectations.

The new preschool teacher was active and we had a clear focus, but when the problems became obvious to her, I ended up in a supervisory role with concrete proposals.

The main tasks as mentor are to provide both knowledge and experience-based advice to newly qualified preschool teachers./ … /I would also convey my perspective on the dilemma and how I had acted in similar situations.

The mentor observes the mentee and can see when the mentee can’t manage or misunderstands situations, such as putting limits on parents’ influence. The mentor is available to the mentee at the department for support if unexpected or complex situations occur. S/he also acts as a role model and invites the mentee to sit in on situations about which the mentee feels uncertain, for example, appraisals with parent and child.

As her mentor, I should have seen her need for support and helped her earlier and more often.

The new preschool teacher had been offered the chance to listen and observe during appraisals with parent and child led by me or other experienced colleagues.

Mentoring as team support

The third conception includes statements indicating that mentor as support is perceived as team support. The mentorship is focused on the team and the development of content, teaching, activities and pedagogy. The mentor feels responsible for team building and arranges appointments for new and experienced preschool teachers and child care attendants, so they can meet for discussions. The mentor sees her-/himself as part of the team, and expects that everyone in the team will initiate discussions and contribute with questions, as well as listen to each other carefully. In the discussions, all colleagues are equal partners, and a mutual exchange of thoughts and ideas is expected, which means that everyone involved has a reciprocal responsibility and willingness to learn. The mentor advocates for colleagues to use professional language, thereby creating a shared understanding.

I believe it can facilitate cooperation between the newly qualified preschool teacher and more experienced preschool teachers. They can bring different skills to the group. In this way, each one is important for the project, the various competencies can be developed as an asset.

I want our conversation to be about professional development in a constructive way, with the lessons learned in both directions.

Mentoring as team support also includes supporting professional relations between colleagues. The mentor creates opportunities for preschool teachers and childcare attendants to get to know each other better, which is particularly important when new colleagues join the team. The mentor’s support enables the mentee to work independently within the team and to create her/his own relationships.

All relationships are, for me, difficult in the beginning. There is a honeymoon period when we may withhold some views because we do not want to offend each other and, to a certain extent, be considerate. We do not know if the other person would be able to handle the ´hard truth´. To initiate a relationship is about investing time and energy in another person. It is a commitment that we want to somehow gain from. A professional relationship and good collaboration can provide something good for the children.

Discussion

The three conceptions that emerged in the results provide a picture of mentoring as support that can be expressed through: mentoring as personal support, mentoring as professional support and mentoring as team support. Mentoring as team support is the most interesting category since it has not been visible in research on mentoring in school. This category is characteristic of the preschool because they comprise a team including preschool teachers, childcare attendants and parents, when compared to their counterparts in compulsory school settings. Below, these findings will be discussed in relation to the literature review.

In the category of mentoring as personal support, the mentor tries to create a relationship to enhance the mentee’s self-reliance. A positive relationship between the mentor and the mentee is needed for development of the mentoring process and the mentee’s professional development (Alsbury & Hackmann, 2006). It can, however, also be perceived as unconditionally supportive mentoring (Langhout et al., 2004) with its high level of active support, but low level of structure, since the mentor does not give clear advice or guidance on specific issues. The way of communication, where the mentor’s goal is to assist the mentee with personal and professional requests, also has similarities with the category of mentoring as support due to the sensitive and tactful aspects (Kemmis et al., 2014a), as with the humanistic perspective (Wang & Odell, 2007). The humanistic perspective, however, describes the mentor’s role more as a counselor – even if the relationship is considered to be harmonious. One finding of this study is that mentoring as personal support gives the mentee more agency through the mentor’s challenging questions, which create greater possibilities for a more intensive participation than the humanistic perspective described by Wang and Odell (2007). The harmonious and very personal relationship between mentor and mentee, from the humanistic perspective, does not include the mentor challenging the mentee. The relationship is expected to lead the mentee to higher self-esteem as a teacher and result in successful learning and teaching, leaving questions about how to learn and teach in the hands of the mentee.

In the category of mentoring as professional support, the mentor plays a very prescriptive role resembling the situated apprentice perspective (Wang & Odell, 2007), where the mentor is an expert in teaching who assists the mentee in developing practical knowledge and teaching methods. As the mentor dominates the conversations, this kind of support could look more like mentoring as supervision (Kemmis et al., 2014a) albeit without the formal assessment. One could argue that the mentor is “piloting” (Lundgren, 1989) the mentee without allowing him/her to learn; if the mentor uses leading questions and pilots the mentee through different tasks, it could look like the mentee is learning without actually doing so. One could thus claim that mentoring as professional support could be a disempowering position for the mentee and constrain his/her professional development. On the other hand, one could imagine that this instructional support is often highly appreciated by new preschool teachers, who are uncertain in their new professional role, as shown in the research by Copeland and Calhoun (2014) where the participants describe formal mentoring (Dunbar & Kinnersley, 2011) as being more structured and purposeful. This, in turn, can encourage the mentor to give advice that risks piloting the mentee and, as Feiman-Nemser and Parker (1992) regard the role of the mentor, acting more as a supervisor than a mentor.

In the category of mentoring as team support, the mentor introduces the mentee into collaborative work and discussion as an equal partner in formal meetings with colleagues (Roberts, 2000). During these meetings, the mentor sets the expectations that everyone is equal and encourages all colleagues to have an open mind, where there are no right or wrong answers. In these meetings, where there are negotiations between newcomers and experienced staff, the role of the mentor can be seen from the critical constructivist perspective (Wang & Odell, 2007) in which the goal of the mentor is to serve as an agent of change by supporting the mentee’s critique of existing knowledge, structures, and culture of teaching. In this way, the mentor and his/her colleagues become learners too through their discussions with the mentee (Walkington, 2005) which can enable their professional development.

Conclusions

This article contributes to knowledge about mentoring in preschool, which is important as research on mentoring of preschool teachers is limited. In order to further develop the understanding of mentoring as support (Kemmis et al., 2014a) among pre-school teachers in Sweden, 75 self-reflective texts about in-service preschool mentors’ experiences of mentoring as support were analyzed. Three different aspects of mentoring as support were found. The results show that the mentor’s role is complex, and the fact that preschool teachers’ mentoring practices have changed from a team-based informal practice to an individual formal relationship between the mentor and the mentee is something that can inform understanding of the organization of mentoring processes. One particularly interesting finding is the category of mentoring as team support, which differs from traditional one-to-one mentoring practices. The fact that preschool mentors deal with another professional group (i.e., child care attendants) in their daily work and have contact with the children’s parents on a daily basis indicates that the preschool setting faces other challenges and places different demands on the mentor compared to mentors in school (for pupils aged 6–19). In order to develop the workplace as a whole and support the mentee as a colleague and new member of the profession, the mentor may have to take on this third role of coordinator in mentoring as team support, with the aim of enhancing professional relations among all colleagues.

In the category of mentoring as team support, the results show that other preschool teachers and child care attendants are included in mentoring to a high degree, which has an impact on both the professional development of the mentee as well as on the more experienced colleagues by bringing, e.g., scientifically based knowledge and research into the discussion. If this relationship is established, there are great opportunities for creating collective knowledge at the preschool, which challenges the mentoring pair-relationship which is the common way of mentoring in school in Sweden. School mentoring may have something to learn from preschool mentoring in this regard. Even if schoolteachers also work in teams, belong to the same profession and have similar educations, they usually do not work together in the same classroom and meet parents together on a daily basis. As such, they are not challenged by colleagues in their mentoring in the same way that preschool teachers are.

The category of mentoring as team support also proved to be essential both for the involvement of experienced colleagues, who invited reflection on ongoing activities, and for mentees, who made sporadic contributions. Including new preschool teachers as part of the team during their mentoring may positively influence team development and ways of working. Mentoring as team support not only provides an opportunity to add legitimacy to the participation of new preschool teachers, but it also provides legitimacy for the participation of experienced colleagues through the dialogue with new preschool teachers that is initiated by the mentor. In this regard, mentoring as team support focuses more on professional activities than on the personal relationship between the mentor and mentee, which also means that the mentoring process contributes to the professional development of the whole staff. Further research is needed to study how mentoring as team support is conducted and discuss what possible consequences, problems and opportunities this form of mentoring can have.

This study has shown that mentoring is about giving newly trained preschool teachers personal and professional support in their first employment especially regarding mentoring as team support. Support for mentoring team building focuses on teamwork related to development of content, teaching activities and pedagogy which can facilitate their introduction. This support can facilitate their introduction to the profession and help mitigate the “practice shock” (Wang & Odell, 2007) that many new preschool teachers experience. Additionally, preschool teacher training can prepare students for practice shock, for example, in terms of social relationships (cf. Clotfelter et al., 2006; Rice, 2010). Teaching pre-service preschool teachers at university can provide students with theoretical and practical tools and, during work placement, they can practice under supervision their social relationships with children, other preschool teachers, caretakers and parents in order to support mentoring team building. Preschool teacher education can also clarify the importance of working in teams and the value of sharing information, knowledge and experience with other students and colleagues, as well as providing each other with personal and professional support. During preschool teacher education, these skills can be developed through tasks and projects that require teamwork.

Although this study is limited by its national context, the chosen context nevertheless gives us a differentiated picture of mentoring as support directed at team building and we argue that it should be highly valued. We hope that this can have an impact on how to reflect on and problematize the concepts of mentoring in mentoring education and induction programmes internationally. We welcome further research from other countries on mentors’ perspectives on mentoring, both in a school and preschool setting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Sweden, there are both municipal and independent schools and preschools, which are offered to all children. They must be approved by the School Inspectorate. Attendance of municipal and independent schools is free of charge. For attendance in preschools, the municipality or education provider determines the fees. The Education Act states that fees must be reasonable and based on the parents’ income.