Ecosystemic perspective and training of mentor teachers of newly hired teachers: a multiyear journey

This paper focuses on the need to enhance the distributed education leadership (Spillane, 2006; Harris, 2014, Leithwood & Seashore Louis, 2012) as democratic and focused (Moretti, 2022). The ecosystemic perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Ellerani, 2022), helps redefine the current several positions at school, especially those of mentor teachers of newly hired teachers, because their roles are increasingly strategic. Mentor teachers developing ecosystemic posture (Fiorucci & Moretti, 2022a; Fiorucci, Moretti & Margottini, 2023), on the one hand promote self-reflection on several-year working experience (Schön, 1983). On the other hand, capitalize teachers’ knowledge accumulated over time putting it at peers’ service, in a collective – both, mesosystem and microsystem – perspective. Mentor teachers’ ecosystemic posture is defined by the capacity to combine specific responses to challenges concerning education needs, methodologies and didactic, organization, communication, regulation and adaptation to school environment experienced by newly hired teachers, with the ability to act consciously at systemic level, as mentor teachers represent schools as multilevel (macro, meso and micro) and multiple actor contexts. This posture enables mentor teachers to contribute to integrate organizational players’ actions and vision, with relevant social and local stakeholders behaviours and missions (Crozier & Friedberg, 1977). The multiple level system is part of the more general trend to delineate multilevel and multiple actor representations of training and education systems (Scheerens, 2018). These representations aim to clearly describe complex systems and subsystems, and highlight positive/negative interrelations among the several elements to be examined (Moretti, 2022).