Teachers' Experiences of Academic Mentoring and Supervision in Public Schools of Quetta

Abstract

Academic supervision and mentoring shape how public-school teachers experience their professional lives, yet little is known about how these processes actually unfold in the specific socio-economic, political, and demographic setting of Quetta, Pakistan. Design: This study adopted a qualitative research design, using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to analyse the data. Population: The population comprised public-school teachers working at the middle-school level in and around Quetta, Balochistan. Significance: The study addresses a notable gap in the literature on teacher supervision and mentoring in Balochistan and offers context-specific evidence to inform policy and practice in this area. Respondents: Twenty in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty middle-school teachers (twelve female, eight male), drawn from urban, peri-urban, and rural public schools in and around Quetta. Findings: The findings identify six connected themes: (1) the compliance encounter, in which supervision becomes an administrative exercise rather than a pedagogical dialogue; (2) an invisible, informal support network based on peer mentoring where formal induction fails to take place; (3) a system built for the centre, in which distance, gender, and disruption lead to differential access to supervision; (4) categorical invisibility, in which multigrade, inclusive, linguistically diverse, and co-curricular classrooms lie beyond the scope of the supervisory template; (5) material conditions for professional development, such as delayed salary and patronage in staffing; and (6) proof of concept without institutionalization, in which pilots that had demonstrated the efficacy of alternative methods of supervision could not be institutionalized due to a lack of continued government funding. A meta-theme of not being indifferent, just underserved, runs through the six, showing that teachers are not resisting the idea of accountability but only its current, administrative, undifferentiated form. The findings extend developmental and instructional supervision theory to the underexamined context of a provincial South Asian society and offer practical recommendations for policy-making.