Factors in the compulsory school environment that support male novice teachers

Abstract

This article reports from an interview study with seven male novice teachers who taught in six compulsory schools across Iceland. They taught mostly in Grades 4 to 10. The teachers were interviewed five times each during their first two years of teaching. The study was carried out to study gender-related issues in the induction of novice male teachers. This article focuses mainly on more general issues in their induction and has two goals: To cast light on what the novices saw as supportive and to propose pathways about the arrangement and expansion of novice induction in Iceland. We also asked which and what kind of factors in the school environment were supportive of male novice teachers The article is based on research about novice teachers, mentoring, and supervision. There is a general agreement in the literature that novices need careful induction into the job; also, that the induction needs to be formal but that informal factors can support formal mentoring and supervision. Several Icelandic studies have shown that formal induction and mentoring is seldom the case in Icelandic compulsory schools. Only two of the seven participants in this study had a formal mentor and, in these instances, they did not even meet as regularly as recommended. We knew this before we began analyzing our data, with the question about supporting factors in the school environment in mind. Our main findings include that our interviewees experienced a general welcoming attitude in the schools. They told us that they could ask anyone about what they needed, not only teachers but also school administrators, career counselors, and support staff. The most important support probably came from team teaching and other forms of cooperation with more experienced teachers. Although not all of our interviewees worked in a formal team-teaching setting, many of them knew of such settings within the same school, and they also pointed out that much support was provided in many varieties of informal cooperation between teachers during preparation for teaching. In four of the schools, there were male-only clubs that our interviewees told us were supportive. The results are, overall, consistent with previous findings in Iceland which have included both short-term and longitudinal qualitative studies as well as a survey study. In conclusion, we argue that the induction of novice teachers in Icelandic compulsory schools (of all genders) can be expanded. We suggest five pathways. First, the traditional one of a mentor-mentee. Each novice should be assigned a mentor, preferably in the same subject or in the same year group (see also María Steingrímsdóttir & Guðmundur Engilbertsson, 2018). Such relationships need to be strengthened and perhaps supervised by the school principals. Secondly, it seems like supervision of novices can be linked to formal or informal team teaching in such a way that a team of three or four teachers can take on a co-responsibility for the induction of the novice teacher (e.g., Pennanen et al., 2020). Such induction can be integrated with the traditional model of mentor-mentee. The third way is to link novice teachers together in effective ways as a peer-group support. One approach is that an experienced teacher can supervise meetings of novices, for instance in the form of “a novice-café” meetings (Hildur Hauksdóttir, 2017a). In the fourth place, the feasibility of male-only meetings should be examined, either all male teachers and male staff in the school, or only male novices. If this is done, it is important that this kind of support includes reflective discussions about stereotypes of male and female teachers, including the idea that male teachers – even novice teachers – are better at discipline management than female teachers (e.g., Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson et al., 2022). The last method we emphasize is regular observations in the classrooms of the novice, not only linked to formal assessment or only performed when problems arise. Overall, induction of novices needs to be taken more seriously in Icelandic compulsory schools. The four last pathways we mentioned are not to replace the mentor-mentee form of induction, but to support that form