Lack of progression is the dividing line: mentoring teachers’ perspectives on student teachers’ emotional challenges during work placement education

ABSTRACT

Student teachers commonly report encountering emotional challenges in work placements during teacher education. Even so, the perspective of mentoring teachers has been given little attention regarding the student teachers’ emotional challenges. In this study, the authors’ aim is to investigate what mentoring teachers perceive to be the emotional challenges student teachers face and what support they think they can offer student teachers. A sample of 25 Swedish mentoring teachers participated in an interview study. According to the findings, the mentoring teachers reported three main emotional challenges that they perceived that student teachers encounter: conflicts with/among pupils, encountering diverse pupil populations and dealing with failure. Mentoring teachers’ reports can be understood in the light of their idea of what work placement should be. Their rationales included the need for student teachers to be either exposed to ‘reality’ or protected from worst-case scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Mentoring
• teacher education
• emotional challenges
• constructivist grounded theory

Research on mentoring in work placements during teacher education has demonstrated that mentoring teachers mostly focus on lesson planning, content and execution (Hoffman et al. 2015). Hoffman et al. (2015) show that the feedback issued by mentoring teachers is often given either as advice on what student teachers should do or as praise and criticism. Such feedback tells student teachers ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’, but it does not invite them to reflect upon their actions (Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen 2014). Although research on mentoring teachers exists (for a review, see Hoffman et al. 2015), it seldom examines their perspectives or theorizes on their work (Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen 2014). Research on mentoring that focuses on challenging situations faced by student teachers during their work placement is scarce. In addition, while studies describing student teachers’ perspectives on dilemmas and emotional challenges during their work placement education do exist (e.g. Lindqvist et al. 2017; Lindqvist, Thornberg, and Colnerud 2020), the current study is the first – as far as we know – to investigate mentoring teachers’ perspectives on emotional challenges for student teachers in work placement during teacher education.

Mentoring students during work placement in teacher education

During the work placement element of teacher education, student teachers shadow and work together with a mentoring teacher. This is a practice that is common worldwide (Orland-Barak and Wang 2021). Therefore, mentoring teachers have an important function in supporting student teachers during their field experiences (Hobson et al. 2009). Nesje and Lejonberg (2022) conducted a scoping review of tools used for mentoring and found three overarching tools: technological (a given technological solution), discursive (guidelines for discussion and reflection) and epistemic (overall structures for interaction in work placement education). Their review showed that when these tools were used, there was potential for boosting student teachers’ reflections. Orland (2001) describes the process of becoming a mentor as a conscious process that requires articulating the new role, because it should not be taken for granted that skilled teachers are also good mentors. In Orland-Barak and Wang’s (2021) synthesis of literature and empirical findings, four approaches to mentoring were identified: mentors focused on student teachers’ (a) personal growth, (b) situated learning, (c) core practice and/or (d) critical transformation.

These various approaches contribute to student teachers’ progress in different ways. For example, mentoring teachers with a personal growth approach focus on helping student teachers to resolve their personal problems in teaching. A personal growth approach was also exemplified by Hultman, Wedin, and Schoultz (2007), who found that student teachers progressed emotionally as the mentoring teachers and student teachers interacted, which included a transition away from the student teacher’s egocentric position into a more emotional relationship with pupils. Even so, Hultman, Wedin, and Schoultz (2007) conclude that student teachers usually received advice. It is considered more successful to establish mentoring as a collaborative effort (Aspfors and Bondas 2013; Draves 2008; Hobson 2016).

Aderibigbe, Gray, and Colucci-Gray (2018) conclude that mentoring teachers should be interested in establishing a relationship that builds an understanding of the student teacher’s position. However, this relationship is often unilateral, assuming that it is the student teacher who needs to understand the mentoring teacher’s position, but not vice versa (Aderibigbe, Gray, and Colucci-Gray 2018). Tensions in the relationship between the mentoring teacher and the student teacher can be based on different conceptions of mentoring, expectations related to communication, and beliefs about teaching (Bradbury and Koballa 2008). In addition, Hobson (2016) describe ‘judgementoring’ as a typical shortcoming of mentoring. This involves evaluating and giving instructions, but not being attentive to student teachers’ needs.

In their review of studies on mentoring teachers during work placements, Hoffman et al. (2015) described four main areas: (a) current practices and conditions, (b) innovations in practice, (c) relationships and tensions, and (d) local contexts and teaching practices. In the area of current practices and conditions, untrained mentoring teachers – which was most commonly the case in the reviewed literature – more often relied on feedback focused on evaluating the student teachers. In a study by Björndal (2020), student teachers tried to save face when they received critical feedback. Chaplain (2008) concludes from surveying teacher stress that monitoring the mentoring practice should be considered essential to better prepare student teachers for working as a teacher. In sum, research has investigated different approaches and strategies concerning mentoring of student teachers and causes of tensions. However, knowledge of how mentoring support students in emotionally challenging situations is lacking.

The current study

While most student teachers’ experiences of emotional challenges in their teacher training occur during work placement (e.g. Deng et al. 2018; Haritos 2004; Lindqvist et al. 2017), there is a lack of research on mentoring teachers’ perspectives on this issue. Therefore, our aim with the present study is to investigate what mentoring teachers perceive to be emotionally challenging situations for student teachers and what support they think they can offer them.

Method

We adopted a qualitative research design based on constructivist grounded theory in order to examine mentoring teachers’ perspectives. Constructivist grounded theory is a suitable method when studying social processes, meaning and interaction (Charmaz 2014), and is thus appropriate when studying experiences of mentoring teachers’ perspectives on the emotional challenges of student teachers during work placement education.

Participants

Twenty-five mentoring teachers (20 females and 5 males, age range: 37–58 years old, M = 47.66, SD = 5.54) from Swedish upper elementary schools (pupils aged around 10–12 years) and lower secondary schools (pupils aged around 13–15 years) were recruited for the study. Most of the participants had ample experience of working as a teacher (9–31 years of experience, M = 20.04, SD = 6.15). All of them had taken some courses in mentoring student teachers, but these courses varied in terms of credits awarded and scope. The participants represented different school subjects such as mathematics, English, crafts and geography. The schools at which the mentoring teachers worked were located in various socioeconomic areas, including both rural and urban environments. The mentoring teachers represented five municipalities and three different universities.

In Sweden, work placement in teacher education is divided into segments, and the intended learning relates to the subject courses that the student teachers take during their placement education. In their first year, student teachers have a short-term placement and shadow one teacher, followed by several segments of work placement throughout their teacher education, in which student teachers are expected to take an increasingly active role. In total, student teachers have 20 weeks of work placement education, and they commonly participate in work placements at several different schools during their education. At the end of teacher education there is often a period of about nine or ten weeks at the same school. During this longer period, student teachers are expected to take on responsibilities similar to professional teachers. In addition to mentoring student teachers’ learning to become a teacher, mentoring teachers also evaluate the students’ achievements, including teaching, ability to interact socially, and classroom and conflict management, all of which is reported back to the university.

Data collection

The data were collected using intensive interviewing, both face to face (19 interviews) and using a video conferencing tool (six interviews). The first author conducted the interviews, aiming for an open climate of conversation and a non-judgmental approach. This was achieved by being attentive to the participants’ tones and facial expressions, as well as using follow-up questions and returning to previous statements (Hiller and Diluzio 2004). The participants were asked about their reasons for being a mentoring teacher, their thoughts about the role of work placement in teacher education, what they perceived to be emotional challenges for student teachers during work placement, and what support they considered mentoring teachers could give to student teachers to deal with emotionally challenging situations. The interviews varied from 31 to 70 minutes in duration (M = 49.13, SD = 8.45), and were recorded and later transcribed. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the Ethical Review Board in Sweden (ref. no.: 2019–04099). All individual participants in the study gave their informed consent. The participants were informed that they would have full confidentiality, and accordingly pseudonyms have been used in the transcriptions and findings.

Data analyses

Grounded theory methods of coding, constant comparison, memo writing and memo sorting were used to analyze the data (Charmaz 2014; Glaser 1978; Glaser and Strauss 1967). In accordance with a constructivist position (Charmaz 2014), the process involved initial, focused and theoretical coding. The analyses began immediately with the use of initial coding, which was performed word by word, sentence by sentence and segment by segment. The focus of the initial codes was on the actions of the participants (Charmaz 2014). The large number of codes from the initial coding were used in the focused coding. In the focused coding, the most frequent and significant codes were identified (Charmaz 2014), and definitions of the focused codes were constructed and tried out. This iterative analysis guided further data analysis and coding. Theoretical coding was used more or less in parallel with focused coding and involved analyzing the relationships between the codes (Glaser 1978). In line with informed grounded theory, theoretical agnosticism and theoretical pluralism were guiding principles during the analytical work (Thornberg 2012). All the authors critically scrutinized the analyses, enhancing the trustworthiness of the coding through critical dialogue.

Findings

In this study, all mentoring teachers suggested a range of situations that they thought both high- and low-achieving student teachers found emotionally challenging. The mentoring teachers expressed different mentoring rationales, which meant having student teachers either (a) experience the reality of working as a teacher, or (b) be protected against the worst-case scenarios. The mentoring teachers perceived that student teachers experienced the following emotional challenges: (1) conflicts with or among pupils, (2) encountering pupils with diverse needs, and (3) dealing with failure. Their main concern involved whether student teachers progressed in terms of demonstrating a growing capacity to handle the emotionally challenging situations that could arise in the teaching profession in a suitable way. Furthermore, the mentoring teachers described how they provided support in the following ways: (1) joint reflection, (2) modelling, and (3) preparation. In the following, we first describe the challenging situations and then the mentoring teachers’ views of providing support, before presenting the grounded theory and adding mentoring teachers’ perspectives of challenging situations, support and student teachers’ suitability.

Mentoring teachers’ views of student teachers’ challenges

Pupil conflicts

Mentoring teachers frequently reported that they considered conflicts with and between pupils to be emotionally challenging situations for student teachers. Brian argued that student teachers have to be accepted by pupils, otherwise pupils will ignore their efforts to manage conflicts.

Brian: There could be some squabbling in a lesson where they had to ask a pupil to leave, or it could have been unpleasant, or a pupil just left, or a pupil had been upset about something that happened with another pupil or teacher. There have been all kinds of things that just happen. Something during a break, a fight, anything. To take care of that and settle that.

Interviewer: What do you think student teachers feel is emotionally challenging to handle?

/ … /

Brian: It’s those things, I guess. That’s what’s hardest, obviously. Relationships with pupils, if they don’t do what you want them to. If you don’t get accepted. That’s probably the most difficult thing.

Brian emphasized the importance of establishing a relationship with the pupils. Mentoring teachers commonly discussed student teachers being thrown into an environment, including ongoing conflicts with pupils they knew nothing about. Victor talked about how student teachers might be unprepared to encounter challenges and conflicts among pupils.

Victor: Elementary pupils sometimes fight, and they usually have a hard time handling that. They don’t know how to intervene, or if they should intervene, or what they are supposed to do at all. I can share that feeling sometimes, even if I just walk right in and stop the fight. But I think it’s those things, when you’re confronted with pupils in situations where they act in an undesired or unexpected way. It’s probably that. But you can never prepare for that, because there can be a big variation, and it’s really hard to know what you should do. You can’t really prepare for those things in any good way.

Given the variation of conflicts described by Victor, finding a suitable course of action and intervening when pupils act was considered difficult even for experienced teachers. Mentoring teachers argued that student teachers need to take similar responsibility as professional teachers and be engaged in resolving conflicts. Thus, student teachers were expected to act, even if they did not know the pupils, as described by Julia.

Julia: Spontaneously I would say it is fights. There could be a fight in the hallway, and when you pass by you realize you have to intervene, even though you don’t know who they are. You can’t just walk past and not care, but that doesn’t happen too often.

Conflicts with and between pupils were identified as emotionally challenging situations for student teachers. The mentoring teachers argued that student teachers needed to act and intervene in a confident, adequate, responsible and effective way in these situations to demonstrate that they were suitable to become a teacher. According to the mentoring teachers, remaining passive or avoiding action owing to uncertainty were not appropriate options for student teachers.

Encountering diverse pupil populations

Schools include pupils with diverse needs and social situations, and the mentoring teachers perceived that student teachers had difficulties dealing with some of the challenges that pupils may be experiencing. Mentoring teachers described the presence of pupils in difficulties as surprising and shocking for student teachers. In Lindqvist, Thornberg, and Colnerud’s (2020) interview study with student teachers, they reported that students felt unprepared to encounter pupils who live in poverty. Even though they understood in advance, and in an intellectual manner, that some pupils were living in poverty, encountering them during the work placement at school was still shocking and emotionally challenging. In the same way, mentoring teachers also considered situations in which student teachers encountered pupils with psychosocial and mental health problems as emotionally challenging for student teachers.

Gunnel: When there are difficult pupil cases, it can be very hard. I have had that too, at times, or a group or class with a lot of, or that felt bad/ … ./and that’s hard for classmates, the pupil, me, and the student teacher who was in the classroom at the time. That was difficult for that student teacher. It was hard.

According to the mentoring teachers, as exemplified by Gunnel, teachers sometimes encountered young people from backgrounds that most people would consider terrible and heart-breaking. They reasoned about life situations that most people were not confronted with in their lives. According to Fredrik, being an experienced teacher was the only way of getting used to this diversity in schools, and therefore something student teachers needed help with.

Fredrik: These young people in their teens can come here with lots of baggage. Sometimes you don’t believe it’s true. You think a person could not exist in the type of misery some pupils bring to school. As an employed teacher, and in different groups, you gradually learn and treat the pupils you feel ‘okay, here I need to be nice and handle her carefully’.

Encountering pupils with psychosocial and mental health problems was considered to be emotionally challenging for student teachers and something they needed to learn to manage in order to maintain instruction and teaching for all pupils in the classroom as their main priority. Mentoring teachers also thought student teachers experienced pupils with learning difficulties as emotionally challenging. They perceived that student teachers in general were not well prepared to encounter and cope with these pupils. Embla perceived this to be a consequence of student teachers probably not having experienced many challenges as pupils during their own school days.

Embla: This new group of pupils who are gifted. I don’t know if that is hard for student teachers, but I imagine that: ‘Right, it’s these [gifted pupils] too.’ The student teachers themselves as pupils were probably in the normal flow of ‘You do this, and then this.’ But there are lots of [pupils] now that have different needs, and you have special solutions in many different ways. I’d imagine you’re not prepared for that.

The mentoring teachers reported that student teachers often planned lessons without considering the pupil diversity and therefore did not differentiate their teaching properly. They argued that student teachers must learn to approach the full diversity of pupils in the classroom and not be confined to the average achievers in their classroom instruction and teaching.

Dealing with failure

According to mentoring teachers, several student teachers had described challenges when it came to handling their failures. Katja recognized student teachers’ experiences of their own failures during the work placement as emotionally challenging for them, but she also described how challenging and difficult it was for her to talk to some student teachers about their failures.

Katja: Yes, absolutely, it’s hard to deal with failure sometimes. Who hasn’t [failed]? It can be really hard. And it can be different for different people, and some [student teachers] have a really hard time coping, while it’s easier for others to be open and describe what went wrong. ‘What should I do, everything is hopeless?’ For a lot of [student teachers], it’s hard to talk about. That can be a challenge as a mentoring teacher, if you have a student teacher who has a hard time talking about all the things that are not just thumbs up all the time.

Katja described the challenges of the student teachers’ perceptions of their failure as common. Another dimension of failure was the fact that student teachers were assessed and evaluated continuously during their work placements, and some student teachers found this strenuous, according to the mentoring teachers. In addition, the fact that they were judged by the pupils as well seemed to further impact the situation, as described by Kerstin.

Kerstin: Because the pupils can be a little: ‘You did that wrong, you wrote the wrong thing on the whiteboard.’ That could be stressful too if you don’t want to make mistakes. You don’t want to show your weaknesses in front of the pupils.

In relation to teaching, student teachers sometimes showed emotional responses to pupils who did not understand their teaching or commented on mistakes, as described by Katja. In some situations, student teachers seemed to find that it was harder to teach than they had expected. Nora referred to situations where student teachers felt that pupils did not understand what they were trying to teach and explain. This was described as something that was considered as a failure by student teachers she had met.

Nora: Yes, but I think that they feel like the pupils don’t listen to them or don’t understand them. Without having talked, and you have had a presentation, and then they are supposed to work by themselves and solve some assignments or something, and all the hands go up. You realize that ‘Okay they haven’t understood.’ That affects them and their energy. That’s something personal. They blame themselves for not succeeding.

Student teachers’ failures involved teaching pupils who do not understand, making mistakes when teaching and difficulties with having conversations about pupils’ challenges in classrooms with their mentoring teacher. The mentoring teachers argued that it was crucial that student teachers learned to deal with their failures without ending up with a sense of helplessness and a lack of confidence. Student teachers needed to learn from their mistakes and thereby show the ability to learn and growing capacity and suitability to be a teacher.

Mentoring teachers’ views of providing support

The mentoring teachers expressed two different views regarding how best to prepare student teachers to cope with emotionally challenging situations in work placement education. This included student teachers having to either (a) experience the reality of working as a teacher, or (b) be protected against the worst-case scenarios.

Showing the reality of working as a teacher

A common rationale was that student teachers had the opportunity during work placement to encounter real life in schools. Student teachers were thought of as having to practice teaching, and work placement was therefore considered to be the most influential and important venture in teacher education. Emilia argued that the work placement had to be emotionally challenging in order to be influential and important.

Emilia: I think that if you go through your work placement without experiencing anything as emotionally challenging, then you haven’t made enough effort. You haven’t challenged yourself enough. Because, like we said at the beginning, or I said, to me the occupation is something where you use all of yourself./ … /And I think that’s what we should give them when they’re here. If I don’t have any challenges. I think it’s a good thing [to be challenged], but it could also be challenging and consume your self-esteem. ‘Am I a bad teacher who can’t handle this, am I a bad student teacher who can’t fix this?’

Like Emilia, Ronja also considered work placement to be important, as it showed the reality of working as a teacher in school, and this inevitably included emotionally challenging situations and managing them when they happen.

Ronja: They could say ‘You are a disgusting, ugly old bat’, or anything. They can say anything, ‘You are so disgusting and bad, get the hell away from me’. A pupil could say that. We have those pupils, acting out, without self-control. And it’s hard for student teachers to take that.

Interviewer: How do they act if they hear that? Have you been in situations where student teachers are told that?

Ronja: Well, we talk about it, and sometimes we talk to the pupil and sometimes we send an e-mail to their home./ … /Yes, I think so, we talk about it and solve the problem. Yeah, solve it in a good way. I don’t think they take that with them later on, but instead see it as an experience.

Interviewer: Is it important having experiences like that, that are challenging, would you say?

Ronja: No, but it’s important that you get support in such situations. Because things happen all the time. Decisions and choices have to be made all the time. That’s life. But if you handle 10–15 situations before, or even 200 situations, you learn how to act. It takes no time to solve the problem and then you don’t lose any sleep over it.

According to Ronja, student teachers will experience emotional challenges, such as encountering pupils who act impulsively and say whatever comes into their mind, because this is the reality of everyday school life. Ronja thought she handled this routinely and argued that student teachers need to learn and build up a strategy to cope with such matters as well.

Protecting against the worst-case scenarios

While some mentoring teachers emphasized that work placement was the time to be tested, other mentoring teachers wanted to protect student teachers from adverse work placement situations. They reported concerns about exposing student teachers to too much ‘reality’ to handle on their own. They argued that they would not let student teachers teach the most difficult classes in order to avoid portraying the teaching profession as too difficult. Petra said that she did not let student teachers take over all her lessons. Even though they need opportunities to try and learn new things, she had the ultimate responsibility for the pupils as well as for the student teacher’s learning.

Petra: I’ve heard student teachers talk about their peers where their peers say that their mentoring teacher just says, ‘Here is the timetable, you are responsible.’ I don’t think that’s something I want to do. I’m still responsible for the assessment and the pupils’ development, so I feel more like, we do this together. And I push the student to plan, but in co-operation with me.

Petra emphasized doing the work together as a joint effort. She could not let the student teacher take over all aspects of teaching her classes, since it was important to maintain her own planning. Anne described a scenario where student teachers seemed to be worried about failing, and how she wanted to create a safe place to learn, where pupils were asked to have patience and to be understanding.

Anne: ‘How could we plan a lesson? You need to plan this yourself. You can try, we’ll back you up if it doesn’t go well, but you have to dare to fail too.’ And I feel that many are worried about it being chaos. That the pupils will start behaving badly and they won’t be able to handle that, and then we’ll back them up, if that happens. You say before that ‘You have to try’. You prepare the ground a bit and tell the class beforehand that he or she is taking the lesson, and you have to think about the fact that he’s new to teacher education, and we need to help each other.

Anne created a safe place for learning that also involved intervening when things seemed to spiral out of control. Elvira described such situations, and how these situations were revisited in joint reflection.

Elvira: It could be a pupil who’s angry, or something like that, and then I step in and give support when I think it’s time. I might not do it right away, but observe how the student teacher handles it and you’re there in the background as support. But if you notice something is getting out of hand, then of course you intervene as fast as you can.

Like Elvira, the other mentoring teachers also talked about being supportive in order for student teachers to progress. In sum, we found a difference between two rationales among the mentoring teachers in terms of how to mentor student teachers who face emotionally challenging situations – a tension between showing student teachers the reality of teaching and protecting them from the worst-case scenarios.

Support, progress and suitability

The mentoring teachers commonly reported that they used assessment guidelines from the university to evaluate student teachers. Mentoring teachers also often referred to student teachers as future colleagues, which motivated them to support student teachers’ professional development and to critically evaluate their suitability to help the teacher education program to identify those student teachers that they considered unsuitable as future teacher colleagues. They argued that most student teachers made progress in a short amount of time, despite encountering the emotional challenges described above. The mentoring teachers also considered that they had a lot to offer the student teachers, like Leia in the following excerpt.

Leia: It depends on how far they’ve come, but I feel they are very grateful to have support from someone who has been working for a long time. And then we discuss what the next step is. It’s that simple.

Similar to Leia, Marcus explained how mentoring teachers have the opportunity to discuss their teaching and to give feedback. He also exemplified how to use joint reflection as well as being a role model for teaching in order to promote student teachers’ progress.

Marcus: It feels as if the talk comes more naturally. Because I know, many say we teachers should observe each other, and sit down in some other teacher’s lesson and discuss. That rarely happens, because there’s no time for that. But now it’s more natural, when there are two of us [the mentoring teacher and the student teacher] in the lesson, then we can discuss before: ‘How do we do this now, you take those, and I’ll take those, and we split them and then we talk after that.’

Marcus focused on the joint activities as support for student teachers. A commonly reported support strategy was their efforts to prepare student teachers before lessons – mostly related to teaching, but also the uncertainty of teaching.

Nora: Well, first and foremost you try to prepare them for things you know can happen, and that some of the things that happen in the classroom can’t be blamed on them, and I can’t always understand what triggers a reaction from someone.

Thus, when Nora attempted to prepare student teachers, she discussed with them how things could still happen that were not the fault of the student teacher. Furthermore, the mentoring teachers reported that they provided support to student teachers through modelling and by continually asking them to reflect after they had carried out lessons. If the mentoring teachers still felt there was a lack of progression, they started to question whether the student teacher really was suitable for the profession. Amelie reported an experience with a student teacher who did not meet her standards.

Amelie: He had two weeks with me. And we talked about how we thought it was going and how it could be better, and I gave him some ideas about what was good to think about. And he couldn’t say anything in his defense, because they were true. Now, he didn’t stay long enough for me to see any progress.

Interviewer: How was your communication? Was it different compared to other student teachers?

Amelie: Yes, it was. I felt he wasn’t interested in communicating. It could be me, too, it might have worked better with someone else. I don’t know. It was an experience for me, too. Well, it was probably not ideal either way.

Amelie described her relationship with the student teacher as strained after a while. Like Amelie, Petra had one experience of a student teacher whom she considered to be unsuitable. Petra discussed how the student teacher impacted the class she was teaching negatively, and how being a mentoring teacher was a challenge in this case.

Petra: Well, it’s hard when it’s not good./ … /When you notice that it’s not good then it’s difficult, because you want to find positive things, of course, like: ‘This was good, think about keeping this, but … ’ If you can’t find much positive, it’s hard being a mentoring teacher actually.

Interviewer: How does that feel, or what is it that …

Petra: Well, it’s a real strain. This case was extreme, the last work placement, and I don’t understand how it came to be the last work placement. And then it’s an unpleasant task for me, in his final work placement, to feel like: ‘How did you get here?’ Why didn’t any other mentoring teachers stop this in time?’ And it’s hard, you can see the pupils change. What you’ve built – a structure, a stable group for three years – is torn down in a couple of weeks. Yeah, then I felt like should I be a mentoring teacher or not? It’s like it destroys everything I built. It’s really hard and I’m still responsible for grades, but did the teaching help pupils to get a certain grade? It puts me in a very difficult position.

When the mentoring teachers discussed their efforts to support student teachers, most of the support was focused on improving the student teachers’ teaching, while they expressed fewer ideas and strategies on how to help student teachers to learn to manage other types of concerns, such as difficulties with encountering pupils from poor backgrounds. Mentoring teachers expected student teachers to have social competence to some degree, including skills to relate to others, to be able to learn as student teachers and to be suitable as future teachers. According to Petra, having a good relationship with the student teacher was considered to be the most important part of the mentoring. The student teachers who were seen as difficult to create a relationship with were considered to be the most challenging to mentor.

A grounded theory of mentoring teachers’ perspectives of emotional challenges, support and suitability of student teachers

What mentoring teachers considered to be emotional challenges for student teachers during their work placement can be understood in the light of their views on how work placement should prepare student teachers for their future work (see Figure 1): being exposed to challenges or being protected. Their views involved (a) showing the reality of working as a teacher, or (b) protecting against the worst-case scenarios.

Figure 1. A grounded theory of supervisors’ perspective of emotional challenges, support and suitability of student teachers.

The same basic support was described for all types of challenges that student teachers were thought to encounter. The mentoring teachers recognized that student teachers were different and therefore reported that the demands of the mentoring work varied. Student teachers whom they perceived as experiencing emotional challenges took more time to mentor. This meant that the time spent on reflective conversations, modelling and preparation varied among student teachers, but the support strategies were the same.

The teachers’ main mentoring concerns involved the student teachers’ progression, and whether they demonstrated a growing capacity to handle emotionally challenging situations during work placement in suitable ways. If student teachers were not able to change and improve their ways of managing these challenging situations, this was emotionally challenging for the mentoring teachers. If there was a lack of progression, the mentoring teachers distanced themselves from the student teachers, whom they perceived as missing the necessary basic skills and the ability to learn that they needed to progress in their capacity as teachers. As a result, the mentoring teachers interpreted and evaluated these student teachers as missing suitability to be teachers. Consequently, in those cases where student progression was lacking, mentoring teachers acted as gatekeepers to the teaching profession. Distancing sometimes meant that mentoring teachers were less inclined to recognize and interpret the progress of the student teacher. When students demonstrated progression (according to mentors), they were considered suitable to become teachers, which strengthened the relationship between the mentor and the student, and mentors were further inclined to recognize the ability to learn and student progress (see Figure 1).

Discussion

Work placement is commonly described as the most influential part of teacher education in terms of what it means to work as a teacher (Deng et al. 2018). Previous research has reported how student teachers face a range of emotional challenges, including classroom management issues, students’ diverse situations and worries about their own performance during their work placement (Chaplain 2008; Hong 2010; Lindqvist, Thornberg, and Colnerud 2020). Our study shows the existence of two main views among mentoring teachers, and that these views will most likely have an impact on student teachers’ experiences of work placement. Some of the mentoring teachers’ views are based on withholding challenges and certain classes to protect student teachers. This affects student teachers’ opportunities to encounter and learn to deal with such challenging situations, and they consequently miss out on aspects of how to work as a teacher. Our study highlights the tension among these rationales. While previous studies have focused on emotionally challenging situations in relation to being a student teacher (Deng et al. 2018; Golombek and Doran 2014; Nichols et al. 2016; Timoštšuk and Ugaste 2012; Ulvik, Smith, and Helleve 2017), research on mentoring teachers’ perspectives regarding this issue has, until the present study, been missing in the literature. Our study contributes novel findings regarding work placement in teacher education. For example, we found that mentoring teachers experienced difficulties in situations where they have made efforts to get a student teacher to progress. In addition, the mentoring teachers sometimes found that the student showed no signs of progression in handling challenging situations. When there were no signs of progression, the support from the mentoring teachers was more directive, giving more support through preparation, modelling or joint reflection after lessons. This meant an intensification of support, which was more directive rather than reflective. A possible interpretation could be that mentoring teachers press for changes, and when they do not see any signs of progression, they press harder, which potentially causes frictions between student and mentor, and in turn creates distance between the two parties. It is therefore not surprising that student teachers sometimes find themselves in conflict with mentoring teachers, as suggested by Lindqvist (2019). When pressing for change and being more directive, the distance created by this directive, intensified feedback could instead lead to student teachers feeling lonely, as described by Wilson and Huynh (2019). The relationship between the student teacher and the mentoring teacher is important, as this impacts how mentoring teachers evaluate student teachers’ suitability for the occupation. It is therefore paradoxical that the process of supporting student teachers regarding emotional situations could instead lead to further distance between the student teacher and the mentoring teacher.

A mentoring teacher’s distancing from a student teacher might be the result in cases where there is a combination of student teachers’ lack of appropriate coping strategies and mentoring teachers’ ‘judgementoring practice’ (i.e. not being attentive to student teachers’ needs, and directive rather than reflective conversations, as described by Hobson 2016). This study gives rise to questions about the basis for informed judgements carried out by mentoring teachers (cf. Lindqvist and Nordänger 2018). There will likely be an impact if a mentoring teacher protects the student teacher from the worst-case scenarios or, conversely, puts the student teacher into a challenging class. Both these experiences might enhance or hinder progression. Any such progression is dependent on the feedback and mentoring within the process. Hoffman et al. (2015) described the mentoring conversation as mostly focusing on planning and executing lessons. However, our findings suggest that mentoring teachers’ support for student teachers should not be limited to their teaching practice, and should instead address the whole professional role of being a teacher, including a range of emotionally challenging situations and the professional inadequacies that this might include (Chaplain 2008; Lindqvist et al. 2017).

Practical implications

According to McGraw and Davis (2017) and Hobson (2016), skills in feedback practices deepen the quality of mentoring. However, Clarke, Triggs, and Nielsen (2014) describe how current mentoring conversations tend to be more directive than reflective. In mentoring conversations, we suggest joint and intentional reflections where points of departure can be issues of conflict with and among pupils, and diversity among pupils, as well as fear of failure. The mentoring teachers in our study used open questions as a common strategy during mentoring conversations. However, this seems to be a less useful approach in situations where there are issues with the student teacher’s adaptability. Therefore, we propose the use of departure points in such troublesome mentoring conversations. This focused strategy can potentially support students’ development and understanding of what working as a teacher involves. We also propose that teacher education institutions guide mentoring teachers when they encounter student teachers whom they consider not to be progressing according to their suggestions. Here, we propose that emotionally challenging situations could be used in teacher education courses, as could the concept of a critical friend. Dahlgren et al. (2006) showed that in medical education, being a critical friend was a worthwhile endeavor. This would mean that student teachers could act as a critical friend for a peer student, and not always be on the receiving end of support. We further propose that teacher education works to enhance the quality of collaboration between mentoring teachers and teacher educators, to be able to enhance work placement education when student teachers face adversity. Using trialogues (i.e. having a meeting between a university-based teacher educator, a mentoring teacher and a student teacher), as described by Carlsson (2020), could serve this purpose of explicitly addressing the emotional challenges and relevant coping strategies beyond avoidance, such as focusing on professional skills, as well as problem-solving capacity and building agency. Establishing agency involves influencing individuals to believe it is possible to have control over and an impact on a certain situation (Admiraal, Korthagen, and Wubbels 2000).

Limitations

Some limitations of the study need to be acknowledged. The analysis was based on data from interviews with mentoring teachers. Thus, the participants’ narratives were used as one way to gain access to their perceptions. Furthermore, a grounded theory study offers an interpretative portrayal and not an exact representation of mentoring teachers’ experiences, and it does not end in a fixed result, but it could be open to modification through further data collection and theoretical sampling (Charmaz 2014; Glaser 1978). In addition, the findings are based on interview data with mentoring teachers located in Sweden, and it is reasonable to believe that mentoring student teachers in work placement education differs in other countries, and hence may offer other possibilities for student support. However, the transferability of our findings could still be discussed in terms of pattern recognition and context similarity (Larsson 2009).

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes on contributors

Henrik Lindqvist

Henrik Lindqvist PhD is Associate Professor at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linkoping University in Sweden. His research areas are (1) student teachers learning from, and coping with, emotionally challenging situations in teacher education, and (2) special education.

Maria Weurlander

Maria Weurlander PhD is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the Department of Education at Stockholm University in Sweden. Her main research focuses are on student learning in higher education, and student teachers’ and medical students’ experiences of and dealing with emotionally challenging situations during their training.

Linda Barman

Linda Barman PhD, is a Lecturer in Technology and Learning at the Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences. Her research focuses on change and development in higher education with emphasis on professions’ education, and higher education teachers’ learning and development related to change processes.

Annika Wernerson

Annika Wernerson PhD, MD, is Professor in Renal and Transplantation Science at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology (CLINTEC) at Karolinska Institutet, where she is Academic Vice President of Higher Education. Her research areas in medical education focus on learning in higher education and medical students’ and student teachers’ experiences of and dealing with emotionally challenging situations during their training and early professional life.

Robert Thornberg

Robert Thornberg PhD, is Professor of Education at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linkoping University in Sweden. His main focuses are on (a) bullying and peer victimization among children and adolescents in school settings, (b) values education, rules, and social interactions in everyday school life, and (c) student teachers and medical students’ experiences of and dealing with emotionally challenging situations during their training.