Understanding the policy and practices of mentoring, coaching, and induction for Early Career Teachers: A bridging of two paradigms

While the need to improve Early Career Teacher (ECT) support to address workforce shortages in the short term and educational inequity in the long term is well established, policymakers do not have at their disposal clear evidence for effective mentoring, coaching, and induction programmes. The first phase of this project used a scoping review and subsequent systematic review of the research literature to identify a compelling mechanism for improving support programmes, based on self-efficacy. In the second phase Carol Bacchi’s (2009) framework ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ was applied with a comparative lens to policy documents in England and South Australia to understand current representations of the ‘problem’ of ECT support in each jurisdiction and to generate alternative representations. In the final phase these alternative representations were used to shape a new framework, generating specific recommendations for improving ECT support in South Australia. A key feature of this project is the way in which it navigated two contrasting research paradigms to produce cohesive findings.

Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/395229519106280?p=eU3ettGXJFspD0nvwR