Organization of Teacher Induction and Mentoring in Malta: School Administrators' Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the area of mentoring of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) from a school administrator's perspective. The research underpinning this study demonstrates the pivotal role that school administrators can play in supporting the induction and possible retention of NQTs from quitting the profession if they engage more directly in the induction and mentoring process. This introductory study on the role that Maltese school administrators play in the induction phase helps to highlight the tensions that exist between policy and practice, between the belief that Maltese school administrators hold in being there to support NQTs and what actually happens in reality. The findings demonstrate how school administrators can enhance the program of support that NQTs are currently receiving, namely, by providing more structured time dedicated to being with the NQTs and teachers, helping in establishing and retaining stronger professional relationships with teachers throughout their careers, and working to strengthen the interconnectedness between initial teacher education, induction, and ongoing professional learning. Received: 26 October 2024 | Revised: 25 March 2025 | Accepted: 4 June 2025 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support this work are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author. Author Contribution Statement Christopher Bezzina: Formal analysis, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Benjamin Kutsyuruba: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".