Stability and Change of Mentoring Practices in a Capricious Policy Environment: Opening the “Black Box of Institutionalization,” by Virginie März, Geert Kelchtermans, and Xavier Dumay

Over the last decades, mentoring practices–as one form of teacher induction–were established as a way to help beginning teachers overcome difficulties during the first years of their career and to keep them in the profession. Yet, although these practices had already existed informally, in many countries one could witness its formalization: mentor preparation programs got installed, mentoring policies were designed and implemented and the mentor role as such became professionalized. These same trends are also visible within Flemish (Belgium) education policy as well as in local school practices. In September 2006, a new Decree on teacher education in Flanders further institutionalized mentoring by defining the professional profile, funding procedure, and job description for mentors. Additionally, so-called mentoring hours (extra funding) were introduced to partly release experienced teachers from teaching duties and make them available as mentors to support new teachers. However, as part of budget cuts in September 2010, the mentoring hours were withdrawn by the Minister of Education. So discursively the government continued to stress the value and importance of mentoring. However, at the level of her policy actions, she took a very different stance, by cutting back the financial resources. This capricious policy environment constituted an interesting opportunity to study and analyze the interplay between the macro-level of changing institutional logics and the micro-level of human action.

Our article in the American Journal of Education reports a study in which we took on the recent call for more empirical research into the way local actors “talk back” to shifting institutional pressures. Instead of portraying organizations and their actors as merely passively adapting to the rules imposed by the institutional environment, we started from a more interactive view on the interplay of agency and structure. Combining concepts from neo-institutional theory with sense-making theory, we sought to understand how local actors engage with policy change and shifting institutional logics in their day-to-day organizational practices. In particular, we focused on how institutional logics related to mentoring were translated, maintained, or disrupted by actors and their (inter)actions at the organizational level.

Drawing on an in-depth longitudinal case study of one secondary school, we examined the relationship between the changing policy environment and the school’s local mentoring practices. We studied to what extent individuals and groups tried to act upon these logics as to reinforce or influence particular beliefs and–the other way around–how these logics structured the social interactions related to mentoring. Data were collected on three moments over a period of four years: (1) school year 2009-2010 (after granting the mentoring hours), (2) school year 2011-2012 (after the budget cut), and (3) school year 2012-2013. We combined semi-structured interviews with participants involved in the induction process (school principal, mentor teachers, new teachers, and more experienced teachers) with observations of actual mentoring practices in the school (supervision and information sessions for beginning teachers, one-on-one meetings between the mentor and beginning teachers, and between the school principal and beginning teachers). Additionally, we collected and analyzed relevant school documents in relation to mentoring practices in the school.

The analyses presented in this article demonstrated how the mentoring hours not only provided schools with additional resources, but also installed a new logic on to mentoring. In particular, we identified a shift from a logic of mentoring as a vocation toward a logic of mentoring as a profession. As such, mentoring hours were not a neutral policy instrument, but provided legitimacy for very particular mentoring practices and not others. The new logic moved the organization of mentorship away from informal practices to a more professionalized and partly bureaucratized system of mentoring. Under this new logic, the main objective shifted from transmitting the love and passion for teaching to emphasizing and planning the different steps that are necessary to become a proficient teacher.

Furthermore, by highlighting how mentors engaged with shifting policies, drawing on their own sense-making, engaging in negotiations with other teachers, and using policy resources, this article unravels how mentors actively constructed meaning within a shifting policy context and how these constructions affected the coupling between institutional demands and local mentoring practices. The fact that the mentors internalized elements of the new mentoring logic–because it lent legitimacy to their position as a mentor–illustrated how the institutionalization of mentoring operated in part through the actions of local actors in the organization. By taking into account mentors’ sense-making, we were able to explain how the institutionalization of mentoring as a professionalized job was not simply the outcome of institutional pressure, but also of specific agency by individuals themselves.

But the article does not only make an empirical point regarding mentoring practices. At the theoretical level, this article provides nuanced insights into how messages from the environment enter into schools and how such messages are (re)interpreted, filtered, and strengthened through local actors’ meaningful social interactions. It illustrates how school organizations are not merely the instantiation of institutional logics, but are places where people and groups make sense of, and interpret, institutional vocabularies of motive. And, it exemplifies how individual agents (i.e., mentor teachers) still have “considerable degrees of agency” within the broader context of institutional structures and processes (Bévort and Suddaby 2015, 2).

References

Bévort, F., & Suddaby, R. (2015). Scripting professional identities: how individuals make sense of contradictory institutional logics. Journal of Professions and Organization, jov007.

Virginie März is an assistant professor at the Department of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam. Her research and teaching interests include planned and unplanned change processes in school organizations. Her recent studies combine sense-making theory, neo-institutional theory, social network theory, and qualitative research methodology to understand the implementation of educational reforms and the professional development of beginning and senior teachers.

Geert Kelchtermans is a professor in education at the KU Leuven in Belgium, where he chairs the Center for Educational Policy, Innovation, and Teacher Education. His research interests are teacher development, leadership and innovation in schools, pedagogy of teacher education, and qualitative research methodology.

Xavier Dumay is a professor in education at GIRSEF (Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la socialisation, l’éducation et la formation), Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research interest lies in educational policies, educational administration, and research methodology.