Conference Agenda

This symposium examines the professional development and retention of homeroom teachers. In subject‑teacher systems, where students are taught by multiple teachers, a single teacher is appointed as the homeroom teacher to support students’ holistic development and coordinate collaboration among parents, teachers, and student welfare professionals. Homeroom teachers are typically subject‑specialist teachers who assume additional responsibility for the personal and social development of one class of students. The role has long historical roots across many countries (Best, 1999; Galassi et al., 1997; Smilie, 2025), and research has shown it to be critical for students’ well‑being (Da’as, 2025a) and academic achievement (Chen & Zao, 2022). When problems arise, homeroom teachers often serve as first responders; thus, they confront some of the most challenging issues related to student misbehavior, mental health, and school–home communication (Kuusisto et al., 2025; Shoshani, 2025; see also Da’as, 2025a).

Despite the importance of the role, research on homeroom teaching remains limited, and homeroom teachers typically receive no specialized preparation - even in countries where the role is acknowledged in educational policy documents, such as China, Estonia, and Israel (e.g., Mizrahi‑Shtelman & Sapir, 2025; Ye et al., 2023). Homeroom teaching is both theoretically underdefined and practically ambiguous, contributing to substantial variation in national and local expectations. Tasks may range from administrative responsibilities, such as monitoring absences and delivering announcements (Galassi et al., 1997), to pedagogical and social duties, such as responding to individual student needs and cultivating a positive classroom climate (Baeriswyl et al., 2021; Kuusisto et al., 2025). In some contexts, homeroom teachers are conceptualized as “moral managers” (Ye et al., 2023), and in others their work aligns with pastoral care traditions (Best, 1999; Purdy, 2013).

Homeroom teachers’ responsibilities often include extensive “meta‑work”, the behind‑the‑scenes efforts necessary to support student learning and engagement, including coordination with parents, colleagues, and multiprofessional student welfare networks (Kuusisto et al., 2025). Especially meta‑work demands extend beyond traditional teaching and require continuous boundary work from individual teachers (Mizrahi‑Shtelman & Sapir, 2025). Unsurprisingly, homeroom teaching is consistently seen as one of the most stressful and challenging aspects of teachers’ work (Baeriswyl et al., 2021; Galassi et al., 1997).

Subject teachers thus navigate a dual professional identity: they are experts in their academic disciplines and, simultaneously, educators responsible for students’ holistic moral, social, and behavioral development (see Purdy, 2013; Tirri & Kuusisto, 2022). Since subject‑teacher education typically emphasizes disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (e.g., Juvonen & Toom, 2021), some teachers prefer to focus solely on subject teaching and distance themselves from broader educational responsibilities (e.g., Rissanen et al., 2018). Others have internalized this dual role (Popper‑Giveon & Shayshon, 2017) and are more inclined to take on homeroom responsibilities (Kuusisto et al., 2025).

This symposium investigates homeroom teachers’ professional development both at the beginning of their careers and as they continue in the role. It further identifies key factors that promote retention, job satisfaction, and sustained work engagement among homeroom teachers. The symposium concludes with a discussant’s talk in which the three national contexts - Estonia, Israel, and China - are compared and synthesized to illuminate distinctive perspectives on homeroom teaching.

In Estonia, homeroom teachers are appointed to every class from Grade 5. In grades 1-4, classroom teachers who teach most subjects also assume this role, whereas from Grade 5 onwards, subject teachers serve as homeroom teachers. Importantly, the homeroom teacher role is not defined as a separate position but constitutes an additional responsibility within teachers’ general workload. Homeroom teachers’ work is guided by the national curriculum, school development plans, and official job descriptions, giving schools autonomy in defining this role. To foster a shared understanding, the Class Teacher’s Handbook (Harro-Loit et al., 2020) outlines key dimensions of the role, including supporting students’ academic and personal development, collaborating with parents and colleagues, and acting as a moral and values educator. The role of homeroom teacher requires competencies in psychology, collaboration, and communication. These competencies are largely developed through professional practice and collegial learning (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2024b), highlighting the importance of in-service professional development. In recent years, the role of homeroom teachers has received increased attention in Estonia, yet empirical research remains limited. Existing studies, mainly at the Master’s level, have focused on specific role dimensions or teachers’ interpretations of their responsibilities (Ilves, 2024; Ruuben, 2017). Little attention has been paid to beginning homeroom teachers, their induction into the role, and the support they require and receive. Addressing this gap, Laaspere (2025) examined factors influencing beginning homeroom teachers’ coping with their new role and the support they need from schools. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven beginning homeroom teachers. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis informed by the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). The findings indicate that while beginning homeroom teachers were generally aware of their formal responsibilities, they lacked a clear understanding of the concrete tasks and time demands involved. Emotional and psychological factors functioned simultaneously as demands and resources; however, available resources were insufficient to offset job demands, leading to difficulties in coping. Support was primarily received from colleagues, yet participants expressed a need for clearer role expectations, mentors, and training. This is noteworthy given that while mentoring is mandatory for beginning teachers in Estonia, it is not specifically provided for beginning homeroom teachers. Overall, the findings indicate that a key challenge for beginning homeroom teachers lies in developing a realistic and comprehensive understanding of the role and its demands, pointing to the relevance of structured induction processes and targeted in-service professional development.

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands‐Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940710733115 Harro-Loit, H., Hirsnik, H., Kõnnussaar, T., Neeme, M., Palts, K., Randma, L., Sutrop, M., & University of Tartu Centre for Ethics. (2020). Class teacher’s handbook: A guide to values education for teachers and school leaders. EKSA. Ilves, R. (2024). The homeroom teacher as a career counsellor [Master’s thesis, Tallinn University]. Laaspere, H.-M. (2025). Factors influencing beginning homeroom teachers’ work and their support [Master’s thesis, Tallinn University]. Ruuben, R. (2017). Lower secondary students’ evaluations of their homeroom teacher’s skills and characteristics across different domains [Master’s thesis, University of Tartu]. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2024b). Experts in care: Homeroom teachers, care work and the development of practice-based care expertise. Educational Review, 76(6), 1581–1600. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2277124

In this presentation, we share key insights from a broader research project examining homeroom teachers’ knowledge, learning processes, and professional identities. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with 142 homeroom teachers working in elementary (n = 60), middle (n = 32), and high schools (n = 50) in Israel. The guiding research question asks what homeroom teachers learn through their everyday work in schools, and how they learn to become homeroom teachers while simultaneously developing their professional identities. The study is informed by a practice-based approach to organizational knowledge and learning (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), which conceptualizes knowledge and learning as embedded in practice, inseparable from action, and situated within specific social and organizational contexts. We present two sets of findings. First, we examine homeroom teachers’ distinctive forms of practice-based knowledge, particularly their expertise in care work developed in their everyday work in schools. This care expertise comprises four interrelated forms: intuitive work, relational work, emotional work and sensory work (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2023). We will specifically focus on how homeroom teachers learn to develop loving feelings towards their students through proactive learning activities, and how they mobilise this emotional capital in their everyday practice (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2025a). Second, we explore homeroom teachers’ professional identity formation. We show how teachers engage in identity work (Brown, 2022) and boundary work (Langley et al., 2019) to construct and sustain their professional identities, and how these processes are shaped by the spatial and temporal dimensions (Hirst & Humphreys, 2020). Our findings highlight how homeroom teachers draw on meaningfulness of their work to constitute their professional identity in the face of public criticism towards teachers and the teaching profession (Sapir & Mizrahi‐Shtelman, 2024), and how they engage in boundary work to form and define their professional group, employing adaptable boundary work strategies, tailored to their interactions with different key stakeholders (Mizrahi-Shtelman & Sapir, 2025). Finally, we will situate homeroom teachers’ identity formation processes within the spatial and temporal structures of schools (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2025b).

Brown, A. D. (2022). Identities in and around organizations: Towards an identity work perspective. Human Relations, 75(7), 1205–1237. Feldman, M. S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization science, 22(5), 1240-1253. Hirst, A., & Humphreys, M. (2020). Finding Ourselves in Space: Identity and Spatiality. In The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations, edited by A. D. Brown, 698–714. Oxford: Oxford University Press Langley, A. et al. (2019). Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process. Academy of Management Annals, 13: 704–36. Mizrahi-Shtelman, R., & Sapir, A. (2025). Navigating boundaries: the evolution of homeroom teachers’ profession through professional boundary work. Journal of Professions and Organization, 12(2), joaf001. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2023). Experts in care: homeroom teachers, care work and the development of practice-based care expertise. Educational Review, 76(6), 1581-1600. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi‐Shtelman, R. (2024). ‘We are not babysitters’: Meaningfulness and meaninglessness in homeroom teachers' identity work. European Journal of Education, 59(4), e12714. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2025a). How love works: exploring the meanings and expressions of love in educators’ work in primary and secondary education. Teachers and Teaching, 1-19. Sapir, A., & Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. (2025b). Becoming a homeroom teacher: spatial and temporal dimensions of identity formation. Research Papers in Education, 40(3), 442-466.

Sup-paper had to be withdrawn.

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