Investigating the Existence of Mentoring Support to School’s New-Entrant Substitute Teachers in the Greek Educational Context: The Role of School Leadership

Teacher mentoring is one of the most well-known and widespread methods of personalized guidance and support for school’s new-entrant substitute teachers insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Bezzina, 2006; Andrews & Quinn 2005; Moyles, Suschitsky & Chapman,1999; Nemser-Feiman, 1996);, providing multiple benefits insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll & Kralik, 2004; Lambeth, 2012);. However, in the Greek context, teacher mentoring as a practice, although it is institutionalized in 2010, has not been yet implemented. For that reason, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether the school’s new-entrant substitute teachers receive mentoring support and guidance, even informally, from their colleagues insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(peer mentoring); and their principal. Additionally, it explores the role of leadership in mentoring support as described above. A quantitative research approach has been adopted. Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 120 school’s new-entrant substitute schoolteachers using the convenience sampling technique. The questionnaires included a Likert-type scale with 51 items measuring different aspects of teachers’ views about their informal peer mentoring support insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Huling-Austin & Murphy, 1987); and leadership style of their principal insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Organizational Climate Descriptive Questionnaire- Hoy & Clover, 1986);. According to the results, the school’s new-entrant substitute teachers seem to receive a small extent informal mentoring support and guidance from their colleagues and principal. However, colleagues provide to a greater extent mentoring support than school principals. In addition, school leadership, especially supportive leadership style is positively correlated with mentoring support.