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As of the 2019/20 school year, newly qualified teachers employed to teach in Austrian schools will be entering a mentoring programme at their career start for the first time. This programme is the responsibility of the school authority and is to last for the induction phase of 12 months. Support to newly employed teachers is provided by collegial mentors and accompanying induction courses provided by the Colleges of Teacher Training. Teaching the curriculum of general competencies as well as the didactic and methodological principles of teaching the diverse subjects of the national curriculum are the stated priority development goals. In order to achieve this, the lesson study approach was chosen as an instrument of professional development support, as it takes advantage of the long-standing and unique professional experiences of all teachers and the school principal in an individual school within its social community.

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2005) represents an international tool to address, plan, and evaluate complex psychosocial interventions. ICF represents a common metalanguage which aims to overcome conceptual profession-specific terminology and increase common understanding and coordination of complex health intervention processes. Even though strongly recommended by the WHO, UNICEF, World Bank, etc., its use is still limited due to the necessary transformations of specific constructs (e.g. in psychology) into the new meta-categories. The paper addresses attempts to transform traditional constructs in psychology and special education into the metalanguage of ICF and provides selected empirical evidence by means of performed usability studies in Austria and Germany of these transformation processes.