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

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.