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Introduction
This paper reports on a qualitative study of the learning and development of 70 external mentors during the first year of their deployment to support teachers’ professional learning as part of the Welsh Masters in Educational Practice. The Masters in Educational Practice is a strategic development in Welsh teacher education offered to three cohorts of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) between 2013 and 2017. It is aimed at providing masters accredited professional learning for teachers in Wales throughout the first three years of their career, forming part of the Welsh Government (WG) “20 point plan” (Welsh Government, 2011) to improve educational standards in Wales. It was developed to provide enquiry-based, theoretically-informed and sustained professional learning as an entitlement for new teachers and reflects international consensus within research that improving the quality of teaching itself is the chief factor in improving the quality of pupils’ learning and attainment in schools (Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Husbands and Pearce, 2012).
Central to the design of the programme is the nation-wide network of external mentors who are experienced practitioners, employed outside of their mentees’ schools and funded by the WG. External mentors support and assess NQTs in the Induction year and engage their mentees in reflective dialogue about their developing practice, values and understanding of teaching, aimed at improving the quality of learning and attainment of pupils. This is sustained for three years. The related long-term goal is that external mentoring builds capacity for school improvement by supporting the development of expertise in early career teachers, enabling them to become pedagogical innovators and agents of change (Hopkins, 2013).
There are inevitable challenges for the professional development of external mentors given these ambitions and the scale of the initiative. The external mentors’ core role is to sustain reflective dialogue with new teachers about their practice development, both face-to-face and online. The lack of a structured and coherent support strategy for early career teachers post-induction is well-documented, for example by Hobson (2012) and Kennedy and McKay (2010), and the demands on external mentors in providing support for new teachers sustained over three years are considerable. At the same time, research into mentor development has been almost entirely restricted to school-based mentors: research into the development, needs and experiences of external mentors...