Integrating mentoring and instruction: teachers’ perceptions of their professional role in different educational contexts

ABSTRACT

We examined how teachers in three types of Israeli schools perceive the prominence of mentoring and instruction domains of their role in school. Using the Concept Structuring Analysis Task (ConSAT) interview protocol, 21 experienced middle school teachers were asked to create individual concept maps representing their perceptions of their role. We structurally and thematically analysed the maps created by seven teachers from each of the following educational contexts (i.e. organisation and ideology): 1) Public schools implementing the ‘Personal Education’ program, in which teachers act as students’ personal and group mentors; 2) Democratic schools, in which teachers serve as mentors for individual students; 3) Public schools in which teachers focus on subject matter instruction with little or no attention to mentoring. Our findings suggest that the school context in which teachers work is closely aligned with their perceptions of their roles as mentors to their students, with each group of teachers differently prioritising and balancing the mentoring and the instruction domains of their role in school. These findings yield implications for research, policy, and practice, shedding light on the strong link between perceptions of teachers and the organisational and ideological context of the school in which they are employed.

KEYWORDS:

• Concept maps
• mentoring
• professional role
• teacher-student relationships
• school context

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tali Aderet-German

Tali Aderet-German is a part-time lecturer at the specialization for school evaluation coordinators at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for the Study of Pedagogy studying organizational and pedagogical aspects of the scaling-up of a state-wide reform. She was also a postdoctoral researcher on the Sapere Aude funded project ‘Education Access under the Reign of Testing and Inclusion’ at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her PhD, carried out at the University of Haifa, examined a school network self-evaluation process. Her research focuses on sociological perspectives of the intersection between educational policy and school practices.

Esther Dromi

Esther Dromi is a Professor Emeritus at the Constantiner School of Education of Tel Aviv University. She earned her BA and MA degrees in Speech Pathology and Clinical Audiology at the School of Communication Disorders in Tel Aviv, and her Ph.D in Child Language at Kansas University. On top of her research and teaching career of about 40 years, she has a clinical experience working with young children with severe communication and language impairments. Professor Dromi has published several academic books in Hebrew and in English as well as many book chapters and about 70 research articles in leading international scientific journals.