Conference Agenda

This study examines the complexities of implementing a new teacher education policy in which in-service mentors act as agents of policy learning within a national initiative involving ministry, district, and school-level stakeholders in Israel’s centralized education system.

Too often, the enactment of innovative policy initiatives in teacher education, whether pre- or in-service, becomes an almost impossible mission. Scholars attribute this difficulty to two interrelated factors: the nature, scope, and readiness for change, and the implementation process itself, including organizational barriers, policy agents’ beliefs and behaviours, and the relationships among stakeholders (e.g., Rigby, Woulfin and März 2016). Previous research has mainly examined structural or individual aspects of implementation, viewing mentors as responsible for executing policy initiatives. Less attention has been paid to examining mentors' roles and practices as agents of policy learning, that is how they enact their roles in ways that shape who learns, what is learned, and how learning occurs (Hall 1993)-the focus of our study. The national initiative aimed to establish mentor professional learning communities (PLCs) as collaborative, practice-based spaces for professional development that support mentors’ collective learning and capacity building. Moving beyond traditional in-service mentoring focused on dyadic support within single schools, the policy positions mentors as agents of policy learning, fostering ecosystemic collaboration across schools (Heikkinen et al. 2025; Kemmis et al. 2012). Although designed to promote a bottom-up agenda for teacher learning, the initiative was implemented through a top-down regulatory framework embedded in a broader, institutionally regulated teacher education system (e.g., Bourke et al. 2022; Crossley 2022). This tension between bottom-up aspirations and top-down structures created a rich context for examining how mentors navigate competing institutional logics and manage their roles as policy learning agents.

The study combines institutional logics theory and sense-making theory within the structure-agency debate in policy implementation and mentoring research. We focus on how mentors interpret structural aspects, understood as the institutional and ecosystemic dimensions of the mentoring context in relation to their mandated agentic roles. Specifically, we examine how mentors perceive the interrelations between policy implementation arrangements, such as policy goals, power relations, and perspectives on professional development, and individual aspects of their agency during the enactment of the new policy initiative (e.g., Imperial 2021). We trace how mentors’ interpretations, embedded in multilevel networks of policy stakeholders (school principals, district coordinators, and ministerial decision-makers), guide their decision-making and actions as agents of policy learning to address tensions related to professional responsibility, accountability, and identity (Coburn 2016; Goffman 1974). We asked:

How do mentors make sense of their roles as agents of policy learning within the broader mentoring-induction ecosystem?

(1) How do they interpret structure-agency interrelations and how do these understandings inform their decisions and enactments as agents of policy learning?

Our findings indicate that through sense-making, mentors construct meaning by relating new information to preexisting frameworks, exhibiting distinctive structure-agency framing patterns (discrete, intersecting, holistic) which serve as cognitive lenses through which they interpret interactions between institutional structures and their own agency, shaping how they navigate tensions within stakeholder networks (Chen-Zimerman and Orland-Barak 2025).

The three major framing patterns allowed for identifying different types of mentors-as- policy learning agents. These insights can inform mentor training and novice teacher induction, highlighting a conception of mentoring as an ecosystem of policy learning networks embedded within the broader institutional policy ecology. They also raise questions about novice teachers’ roles as agents of change in complex educational systems.

Early childhood assessment is increasingly recognised as a pedagogical and professional practice that is culturally, socially, and historically situated rather than a neutral technical procedure. Approaches such as learning stories, originating within the early childhood context of Aotearoa New Zealand (Carr & Lee, 2012; 2019), have travelled internationally and are often presented as exemplars of formative, holistic, and relational assessment (Boss, 2024). Yet the movement of such pedagogies across contexts raises important questions about how assessment practices are enabled, constrained, and transformed within different educational systems.

This proposal starts from the premise that pedagogies do not travel as immutable practices but as ideas, texts, and representations that are reconstituted within different professional, institutional, and policy environments. From this perspective, the meaningful adoption of learning stories depends not only on teachers’ intentions or training but on the broader practice architectures that shape early childhood assessment and teachers’ professional learning. The study, therefore, shifts attention away from the effectiveness of learning stories as a method and towards the conditions under which such pedagogies can be taken up, adapted, or resisted.

In this proposal, we address the following research questions: 1) How are practice architectures of early childhood assessment and teachers’ professional learning configured in Aotearoa New Zealand and Romania, and 2) what do these configurations reveal about the possibilities and limitations of the international travel of learning stories as an assessment practice?

The theoretical framework is provided by the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014), that conceptualises practices as socially organised activities made possible or constrained by three interrelated sets of arrangements: cultural–discursive (the language and ideas through which practices are understood), material–economic (the resources, tools, and organisational conditions that support them), and social–political (the power relations, professional roles, and accountability structures in which practices are embedded). In this proposal, assessment practices and professional learning practice arrangements are examined relationally, with particular attention to how their respective practice architectures align, overlap, or come into tension within specific educational contexts, especially in initial teacher education.

Teachers’ professional development (PD) is today part of the broader lifelong learning movement, shaped by an entrepreneurial logic (Ball, 2009; Canário, 2016). As an institutional, political, and media construct, it promotes the idea of lifelong learning. It is clearly linked to the “contingencies of globalization” in education and training policies (Normand & Pacheco, 2014).

In response to this prevailing injunction, we approach PD through a lens that departs from deficit-oriented perspectives to emphasize opportunities rather than shortcomings (Skytterstad et al., 2025), and to adopt a collaborative and contextualized understanding of professional learning (Enthoven et al., 2023). PD is conceived as an intentional, continuous, and systemic process (Lessard, 2021), rooted in the principle of learning in and for professional practice (Salo et al., 2024). This approach encompasses multiple learning spaces that we investigate among in-service teachers, ranging from formal training and mentoring to informal, team-based learning.

However, as pointed out by Coppe et al. (2024), research offers little insight into mid-career and late-career teachers (those with more than 20 years of experience), as studies have predominantly focused on early-career teachers. Since the early 2000s, in most Western countries, the profession has faced a crisis due to the shortage of qualified teachers (Dupriez et al., 2023). Consequently, research has primarily concentrated on teacher recruitment, attractiveness, and early-career issues rather than on sustained professional engagement over time.

In Switzerland, the canton of Vaud offers a particularly revealing case of a profession under transformation. Local education policies have encouraged schools to co-construct key institutional concepts – quality, sustainability, digitalization, inclusive education – fostering the emergence of new roles within school organizations. This diversification of roles reflects new possibilities for teaching careers beyond the classroom. Yet these reconfigurations produce uneven effects on autonomy and recognition across professional segments (Fassa-Recrosio & Bataille, 2019). Paradoxically, several studies report a certain reluctance among teachers to engage in training activities linked to policy initiatives (Girinshuti et al., 2025), often perceived as detached from everyday professional realities (Darling-Hammond, 2009; Lessard, 2021).

Over the past two years, the University of Teacher Education in Lausanne has undertaken a research-and-development initiative to better understand teachers’ representations, rationales, and needs regarding PD. The project draws on administrative training data and survey results collected from various school professionals. A large-scale quantitative questionnaire was also distributed to all teachers at both compulsory and post-compulsory levels.

Confronted with seemingly contradictory findings – on the one hand, the multiplication of roles and opportunities; on the other, low participation and persistent reluctance - our contribution examines the links between engagement in PD and engagement in the profession. The analysis combines Kanter’s (1968) theory of commitment with Hughes’s (1997) conception of professional careers. For Kanter, commitment rests on three dimensions: continuance (cost–benefit considerations), affective (emotional attachment) and moral (sense of duty). Consequently, engagement in PD can be seen as a specific form of organizational and professional commitment, involving investments of time, energy, and professional identity. At the same time, following Hughes, professional careers comprise both a core activity and peripheral ones. Within this framework, teaching represents the core professional activity, while other roles performed by teachers may constitute peripheral activities that reshape professional engagement and career trajectories.

We hypothesize that PD can alternatively reinforce teachers’ attachment to their core teaching activity or act as a gradual reconversion strategy toward peripheral functions – or even as a pathway out of the profession.

The teaching profession, characterised by high emotional demands, is often associated with significant stress (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2020) making the teaching profession one of the professions that are more inclined to burnout (Garrick et al., 2014; Maslach et al., 2001). Teacher shortages and increased levels of teachers’ stress and burnout have been a recent challenge in Europe. Across the European Union countries, over 50% of teachers report high levels of stress (OECD, 2020). Slovenia is one of the top five countries where teachers who reported experiencing stress at work a lot are more likely to want to leave teaching in the next five years (OECD, 2020). On the opposite, teachers that report higher levels of job satisfaction report the intentions to stay at their job (OECD, 2020). Nevertheless, teacher’s wellbeing is not only important for them but also affects their teaching styles (Aelterman et al., 2019; Katz & Moe, 2024) and overall supports positive student development (Aldrup et al., 2022). In addressing the societal need for recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers, understanding the mechanisms of teachers’ well-being, their job satisfaction and their burnout levels, is crucial.

Our study aimed to (a) thoroughly examine the pathways to positive teacher development by identifying internal and external assets leading to teachers’ job satisfaction and burnout in addition to recognising the relational nature of teaching profession with analysing Positive Teacher Development Model fit across teachers’ career stages. Positive Teacher Development Model (Kozina & Pivec, 2026) understands the mechanisms of teachers’ burnout and job satisfaction as a result of an interplay of multiple levels of individual ↔ context relationships, internal and external assets, being supported by teachers’ relationships with students, colleagues, and school leaders. The model as such recognizes collaborative and relational nature of teaching by placing the quality of teachers’ relationships with students, colleagues, and school leaders at its core. The model is grounded in the Socio-Ecological Model (Bronfenbrenner& Morris, 2007), Relational Developmental Systems Theory (Overton, 2015), and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). The model has been empirically tested (Kozina & Pivec, 2026), but not yet empirically validated across teachers’ career stages.

Teachers’ careers have been traditionally considered to consist of two parts: preservice, which refers to the initial teacher education (universities or colleges), and in-service (from entry and exit from the profession). The pre-service period is a period of acquiring knowledge, competencies, and skills needed for the teaching profession in the process of professional identity formation. The in-service period is further characterised by different stages. Huberman (1995), based on extensive qualitative research, divides career stages into five stages: survival and discovery (1–3 years of work experience), stabilization (4–6 years of teaching experience), experimentation/diversification or stock-taking/interrogations (teachers with 7–18 years of work experience), conservatism or clarity (teachers with 19–30 years of work experience). The final stage is disengagement (teachers with more than 30 years of work experience). There are challenges associated with increased stress and burnout in each stage therefore in is important to analyse predictors of teachers’ positive development in different career stages. In the study we will test the fit of the Positive Teacher Development Model across different career groups on a sample of Slovene in-service teachers.