This article examines contested practices of mentoring of newly qualified teachers within and between Australia, Finland and Sweden. Drawing on empirical material collected in a variety of studies, we demonstrate three archetypes of mentoring: supervision, support and collaborative selfdevelopment.

Using the theory of practice architectures, we show (1) that the three forms of mentoring identified represent three different projects: (a) assisting new teachers to pass through probation, (b) traditional mentoring as support or (c) peer-group mentoring; and (2) that these three projects, also involve and imply quite different practice architectures in the form of different material-economic, social-political and cultural-discursive arrangements.