The Everyday Professional Experiences of Homeroom Teachers in a Chinese Secondary School

Abstract

As significant others in the educational process, homeroom teachers play a crucial role in the physical and mental development of students and their adaptation to school life. Much effort has been made to analyze the impact of homeroom teachers’ work on students, but little attention has been paid to the everyday professional experiences of the homeroom teachers themselves. This article examines the perceptions and action strategies of homeroom teachers regarding their daily work, using a typical county secondary school in North China as an example, and to gain insights into the shaping mechanisms behind the individual actions of homeroom teachers, thereby clarifying the structured characteristics of the daily experiences and institutional logic of homeroom teachers’ work. The findings indicate that under the guidance of totalism and instrumental rationality in educational policies, the work of homeroom teachers gradually falls into a vicious cycle of job alienation, compliance burden, interweaving of meanings, and strategicism. This unintended consequence is shaped by mechanisms such as administrative expansion, training disembedding, rigid assessment, insufficient motivation, and lack of social support.

Introduction

Homeroom teachers, as linchpins of classroom management and student development, occupy a pivotal role in educational systems across Asia and beyond (Hörner et al., 2007; Okumura, 2017). Their work intersects with academic instruction, moral education, home-school coordination, and administrative compliance, making them critical intermediaries in the daily operation of schools (Liu & Barnhart, 1999). Yet, while existing research has predominantly focused on how homeroom teachers influence student outcomes (Liu, 2001; Wang & Yang, 2020), far less attention has been paid to their own subjective experiences—how they perceive their roles, navigate structural constraints, and develop coping strategies in their everyday work. This gap is striking, given that the quality of homeroom teachers’ professional lives directly shapes their capacity to support students and sustain their own practice.

To address this lacuna, this study draws on a conceptual framework that integrates two interrelated strands of theory: (1) the interplay between institutional logic and individual agency, and (2) the dynamic interaction between policy structures and frontline practice.

First, we anchor our analysis in the premise that professional experiences are not merely individual phenomena but are shaped by broader institutional logics—particularly the “omnipotence and instrumental rationality” embedded in contemporary educational policies (Zhao, 2014). These logics prioritize quantifiable outcomes, administrative compliance, and standardized processes, creating a system where educational goals are often subordinated to procedural efficiency (Chen & Zhao, 2022). Second, we adopt a processual view of teacher-environment interactions, framing homeroom teachers’ work as a continuous negotiation between structural constraints (e.g., policies, assessment systems) and their own agency (e.g., adaptive strategies, coping mechanisms). This builds on Lawton and Nahemow’s (1973) Person-Environment (P-E) framework, which emphasizes that individual functioning emerges from the dynamic “fit” between personal resources and environmental demands—here, translated into how homeroom teachers’ competencies and identities interact with school policies, administrative burdens, and social expectations.

Against this theoretical backdrop, China’s context offers a compelling case for exploration. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, due to the profound influence of the Soviet educational management system, Chinese homeroom teachers have always been given high importance by the Chinese government. Since the reform and opening up, the Chinese government has continuously made efforts in the reform and development of basic education, with the management mechanism of primary and secondary schools, based on classes as micro-units, becoming increasingly mature. The homeroom teacher, as the main person responsible for class education, has received significant attention from all sectors of society. Since the early 21st century, the Chinese government has intensified efforts to professionalize homeroom teachers through policies such as the Regulations on the Work of Homeroom Teachers in Primary and Secondary Schools (State Ministry of Education, 2009) and China Education Modernization 2035 (Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council, 2019). These policies aim to elevate the role’s status while expanding its responsibilities, from academic supervision to poverty alleviation and epidemic prevention. Paradoxically, this expansion has left homeroom teachers in an ambiguous position: they are tasked with increasingly diverse duties yet remain marginalized in terms of autonomy and recognition, caught between the demands of teaching core subjects (their “primary” role) and managing classrooms (their “secondary” role; Liu & Barnhart, 1999; Lee, 2015).

In practice, this ambiguity manifests in tangled experiences: boundless responsibilities, blurred work-life boundaries, and a constant tension between compliance and autonomy. Homeroom teachers often navigate a landscape where administrative tasks overshadow educational missions, where training programs fail to address on-the-ground needs, and where assessment systems prioritize quantifiable metrics over holistic student development (Zhou et al., 2024). These challenges are particularly pronounced in less-resourced settings, such as county-level schools, where structural constraints are amplified—making them “extreme cases” that lay bare fundamental mechanisms otherwise obscured in more privileged contexts (Eisenhardt, 1989).

This study thus examines the everyday professional experiences of homeroom teachers in a typical county secondary school in North China, guided by our conceptual framework: How do institutional logics (shaped by policies, administrative structures, and assessment systems) interact with individual agency to produce distinct patterns of experience? Specifically, we explore four interrelated phenomena identified in preliminary analysis: job alienation, compliance burden, the interweaving of meanings, and strategism. We argue that these experiences are not random but emerge from identifiable mechanisms—administrative expansion, training disembedding, rigid assessment, insufficient motivation, and lack of social support—operating at the intersection of policy imperatives and local practice.

By unpacking these dynamics, this research seeks to revitalize understanding of homeroom teachers’ work beyond narrow professional discourse, highlighting how their experiences reflect broader tensions in education systems globally, with the aim of informing both theoretical debates and policy reforms.

Method

This article draws on a program of research with homeroom teachers at Shui Secondary school located in X County, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province. Shui is a typical public secondary school in a relatively underdeveloped region of China. During the survey period, there were a total of 35 homeroom teachers in the school, The majority (74%) of the teachers were female; male teachers comprised only approximately one fifth of the sample. More than 70% of the teachers are over 40 years old, while there were only 5 young homeroom teachers under 30. Homeroom teachers are composed of main course teachers and administrative staff, with only two administrative staff also serving as homeroom teachers, namely the academic affairs director and the logistics teacher; the remaining homeroom teachers are responsible for both teaching courses and managing their classes, and the school does not reduce their workload due to their homeroom teacher works. In terms of salary and allowances, homeroom teachers uniformly receive a fixed subsidy and duty allowance.

The study employed a combination of qualitative interviews and a participatory workshop to explore narratives, discourses, and subjective feelings associated with classroom teachers’ everyday professional experiences. Ten homeroom teachers who volunteered to participate were selected. The strategy for selecting participants was “theoretical sampling.” The goal is to maximize the categories until no additional data are found to develop their properties. A category represents a unit of information composed of gender, age, years of teaching, position in the school, or alternative patterns that are repetitive and thematically saturated. Data collection was continued until the theory is elaborated in all of its complexity. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in the school teacher’s office and lasted up to between 1 and 3 hr. Interview questions focused on classroom teachers’ biographies, their perceptions of professional development, the differences between subject teachers and homeroom teachers, their understanding of their responsibilities, the challenges that homeroom teachers face in their work, and their mental health. Most classroom teachers provided rich and comprehensive narrative responses. Some teachers even wrote to the author after the study to describe their reflections. The homeroom teachers who participated in the study clearly thought deeply about their work and wanted to share their thoughts and feelings with the researcher. Workshop included six participants (not involved in the interviews) and lasted 2 hr. Workshop included presenting some of the quotes from the early interviews to the participants for critical reflection and showing the Ministry of Education’s classroom teacher policy to the participants for discussion. Overall, these methods were particularly valuable for understanding the subjective and embodied feelings associated with social ecology of classroom teachers’ work.

The data was imported into NVivo 11 and then analyzed by all members of the research team using a method adapted from “flexible coding” (Deterding & Waters, 2021). The team employed an “independent coding—cross-validation” model. Each team member conducted preliminary thematic coding based on the same dataset, and then compared the coding results through meetings to identify differences. For controversial cases, the team introduced external supervisors (scholars with research backgrounds in educational policies) to assist in defining concepts. This approach involved thematic coding to allow for comparisons between interviews, followed by analytic coding social ecology. Workshop data were analyzed separately for emerging themes and cross-referenced with interview findings to validate or challenge initial interpretations. The themes from everyday professional experiences emerged as key findings during the analysis and are reflected across the dataset. This methodology balances structural rigor (e.g., intercoder reliability, codebook documentation) with contextual sensitivity (e.g., participatory workshops, social ecology framing), ensuring robust insights into the institutional and experiential dimensions of homeroom teacher work. All names below are pseudonyms.

Homeroom Teachers’ Everyday Professional Experiences

Job Alienation

Job alienation refers to a state of psychological separation from one’s own image and social relationships both within and outside the workplace, with a lack of control over task activities (a sense of powerlessness) and a lack of meaningful work (a sense of meaninglessness) being the most intuitive and widespread characteristics of job alienation (Seeman, 1959).

The main goal of homeroom teacher’s work is to understand students, maintain order, organize activities, provide comprehensive evaluations, and facilitate communication. However, in practice, this goal is often overshadowed by specific operational tasks such as responding to school assessments, managing daily classroom affairs, and focusing on individual student growth. These tasks often lack clear boundaries, and homeroom teachers are frequently overwhelmed by trivial matters, leading to a state of exhaustion. Amidst the constant work-related stress, they feel both overwhelmed and powerless. Many homeroom teachers interviewed candidly admitted to gradually losing their sense of control over their work. Coupled with performance evaluations that prioritize instrumental value over educational missions, they increasingly lack identification with their work, feeling that they “cannot influence policies above nor significantly impact students below,” thus finding themselves in a state of job alienation. Teacher Tan complained:

Besides handling the matters related to their duties as homeroom teachers, we inevitably get assigned many temporary administrative tasks. We are called upon to meet at least once or twice a week, and there are even more tasks assigned in WeChat groups. Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, various reports were required, and due to the lack of information sharing among superior systems, repeated reporting was common. It feels like homeroom teachers are being led by various forms, data, and rankings, and we feel helpless and powerless.

From the perspective of the scope of work, school leaders require homeroom teachers to extend their work organically from the school and classroom into society and students’ homes. Faced with high-frequency interactions involving multiple roles, most homeroom teachers lack strong abilities to navigate these role relationships, let alone adopt corresponding management strategies based on specific interaction scenarios. As a result, they inevitably experience role discomfort and low self-efficacy in these complex role interactions.

Teacher Liu, a homeroom teacher with over 20 years of experience, stated:

Not everyone can be a homeroom teacher, and the scope of work is no longer just simple classroom and student management, but involves various aspects such as education, poverty alleviation, epidemic prevention and safety, and is closely related to politics. To put it simply, the homeroom teacher is the nanny of the students, responsible for everything from learning to daily life, including mental health, interpersonal relationships, clothing, food, housing, and transportation, taking over the role of parents. Especially for left behind children who lack family education, we spend a lot of energy on it. We seem to be busy every day, but it seems like we are just mechanically completing a certain task.

The role in the design of the homeroom teacher system is vague, which leads to ambiguity in work from both function and source. The homeroom teacher is unable to clearly control the work process or perceive the work results. Their self-efficacy is eroded, gradually disillusioned and lost in vague work situations, ultimately leading to job alienation.

Compliance Burden

Compliance burden refers to the time and effort that the homeroom teacher needs to invest in dealing with rules that are time-consuming, laborious, and unable to achieve expected goals (Van Loon, 2017). Compliance burden is considered one of the key factors triggering teacher burnout. Many homeroom teachers may feel dissatisfied with a large amount of paperwork that is not directly related to their business. Excessive and unnecessary rules, regulations, and procedural restrictions in teaching, assessment, and training also make teachers feel physically and mentally exhausted. This excessive management not only hinders the diversity and innovation of the homeroom teacher’s work, but also increases the workload and pressure on teachers (Baeriswyl et al., 2021). The accumulation of these burdens and pressures will lead to the continuous deterioration of the homeroom teacher’s emotions, resulting in emotional exhaustion and weakening their sense of belonging to their profession.

Shui secondary school requires homeroom teachers not only to maintain close communication and exchange with students during school, but also to pay attention to mobile phone information during the rest time such as after work and holidays. “Keeping mobile phones on for 24 hr” has become a working habit of many homeroom teachers. This “borderless” task fully shows that the workload of the homeroom teacher has continuous expansion in time and space, so that the work responsibility and burden of the homeroom teacher can expand without limitation. Teacher Wang said:

I get a lot of text messages from students, parents, and various departments of the school every day. The student is going to take a leave of absence. The relevant departments of the school require the student to fill out a form. The patrolling teacher reported that the student slept and played with their phone during class. The subject teacher said that some students refused to submit their homework. The dormitory administrator said that the student did not clean the dormitory or fold the blanket… No text message can be missed, and we must follow up and implement it in the first time. As the homeroom teacher, do I dare to turn off my phone casually?

In addition to strict management systems, schools are always concerned that homeroom teachers (especially rookie) may not have a comprehensive grasp of policies and inadequate risk prediction, so they dare not give homeroom teachers too much autonomy. Teacher Cao is a special post teacher assigned to Shui secondary school in 2022. As a newly appointed teachers, she expressed her views on the autonomy of homeroom teachers:

What the school assigns to the homeroom teacher is the task of uploading and assigning tasks. It’s really difficult to talk about autonomous! Once I wanted to organize my classmates to go on a spring outing during Qingming Festival. The plan was already written, but the school did not allow them to go, and safety was the top priority. Even cancelled the students’ sports meeting. Is this really for the good of the children? Just focusing on academic performance, how can comprehensive qualities be developed? The leaders do not attach importance to the work of the homeroom teacher. We only handle miscellaneous matters for the school, and hand over various materials for poverty alleviation, safety, and legal publicity. When encountering problems with students and unable to handle them on their own, the leaders does not provide clear instructions on how to handle them, and finally you have to take responsibility for the problem.

Under the shadow of busy transactional work, many homeroom teachers can only passively carry out various practices under the constraints of power, leading to a decrease in the dignity, attractiveness, and sense of achievement associated with the position of homeroom teachers.

From Substantive to Symbolic Practice: The Interweaving of Meanings

In grassroots education systems, local education authorities delegate responsibilities to school-level administrators, and homeroom teachers—acting as “last-mile implementers” (the final link in translating educational policies and directives into practice)—bear dual roles: fulfilling administrative targets and mediating the “policy overload” that trickles down to grassroots levels. To compete for educational resources and showcase institutional achievements, schools often refine and expand policy indicators based on their specific contexts before decomposing these tasks to homeroom teachers for execution. This process gives rise to a distinctive dynamic we term “the interweaving of substantive and symbolic practice”—a gradual shift in focus from meaningful educational action to surface-level compliance with procedural norms.

Teacher Mao’s account of pandemic-era work illustrates this shift:

Once COVID-19 broke out, daily work became almost entirely about data reporting. Information systems across departments didn’t communicate, so similar data was collected repeatedly—education and health authorities each required their own submissions. The school added monitoring of students’ at-home learning and health, creating endless WeChat group files and shared forms. Even working from home, it was no easier than in-person work—exhausting! At first, we worked diligently: epidemic prevention was a matter of overall importance, so we dared not cut corners. I understood why the school pushed so hard. But as we grew familiar with online workflows, data collection became less arduous, and the pressure eased.

Yet beneath this routine lay a deeper tension

Honestly, all this fanfare was just to show superiors we took epidemic prevention seriously. Later, things loosened up. The key was to “save face”—avoiding criticism or trouble for the school. People say you have to balance diligence with perfunctoriness; not everything needs strict enforcement. If we clung to rigor in every task, no one could cope. Sometimes, symbolism matters more: as long as publicity is done well, leaders and colleagues will think we met requirements and achieved results.

Homeroom teachers consciously define their role as “messengers” tasked with completing higher-level tasks and indicators on time and in full. In practice, however, they navigate a “tightrope walk”: adhering to policy directives from upper-level education systems and administrative departments (the “tightrope”), while adjusting their approach based on student needs and local realities (the “swaying”). Over time, their focus shifts from “substantive practice”—actions directly contributing to student development—to “symbolic practice”—efforts aimed at signaling compliance, even if they lack lasting educational impact (Zhou et al., 2013). Here, “symbolic practice” refers to the deliberate projection of effort through publicity and documentation, designed to highlight achievements to the school, rather than tangible improvements in teaching or student outcomes.

Strategism: Adaptive Tactics in Response to Rigid Targets

“Strategism,” as used in this study, refers to a spectrum of tactics homeroom teachers employ to meet rigid upper-level targets—ranging from flexible, contextually tailored adaptations to unprincipled or at times deceptive practices. This concept captures the pragmatic (and sometimes ethically fraught) choices teachers make when facing mismatches between institutional demands and on-the-ground feasibility, particularly in resource-constrained grassroots settings.

To meet tight deadlines or avoid negative evaluations, school leaders often tacitly encourage homeroom teachers to adjust records or fabricate data. Teacher Zou described one such scenario:

At the start of one school year, leaders required a baseline test, with grades reported immediately. Many teachers, though finished grading, submitted falsified score sheets. This way, when the school aggregated results for higher authorities, they avoided embarrassment over students’ weak foundations. The school knew but looked the other way—deadlines were tight, so falsification seemed understandable. Similarly, during inspections, we rushed to fill in missing data and materials: unheld class meetings, unconducted activities—all had to be fabricated. Regardless of students’ actual performance, the priority was helping leaders pass upper-level reviews. No one questioned the authenticity of submissions then.

Teacher Bai offered another example of strategic adaptation:

My students can’t compare with others. In activities or competitions, other classes’ students and teachers are enthusiastic, with high-quality entries. For mine? Even getting one or two students to sign up takes endless encouragement. Take the provincial essay contest: despite pushing, no one joined. In the end, I wrote several essays and submitted them. I’m not alone—other homeroom teachers do the same, and the school understands our helplessness. At least, there’s no public criticism.

This “strategic deception” thrives on tacit collusion between schools and teachers. When tasks prove unfeasible, teachers fabricate data or scenarios and report them upward; schools, in turn, accept these fabrications to meet their own administrative obligations. This collusion is marked by “actions that are done but not spoken of, or spoken of but not documented (leaving no traces)”—a stark contrast to formal administrative norms. Yet this hidden flexibility also creates space for teachers to resolve local challenges: within the operational latitude tacitly granted by schools, homeroom teachers use informal adjustments to manage class pressures. In doing so, they preserve the symbolic authority of education systems (shielding schools from assessment failures) while addressing their own practical burdens.

In essence, strategism reflects the paradox of grassroots education work: it is both a survival mechanism for teachers navigating unyielding institutional demands and a symptom of the disconnect between policy ideals and on-the-ground realities.

The Shaping Mechanism of Homeroom Teachers’ Everyday Professional Experiences

A mechanism refers to a set of causal relationships that can be consistently observed under controlled conditions and can also be derived through reasoning, thus being explainable with fixed interaction patterns. Over the past few decades, several important policies and acts issued by the central government regarding the work of homeroom teachers reveal the state’s attempt to reshape the work system of homeroom teachers under the pretext of professionalization. Previous research on the work of homeroom teachers has largely focused on the relationship between teachers and the state, emphasizing the state’s active pursuit of controlling teachers’ daily work through political, ideological, cultural, and economic means. However, the shaping mechanism of this top-down approach is often not fully elaborated. This section will be based on everyday school practices to explore how the daily work of homeroom teachers is driven by different events, thereby shaping the aforementioned unique professional experiences in interaction with the socio-ecology.

The Colonization of Professionalism by Administration

The intensifying bureaucratization of education has reshaped homeroom teachers’ work through mechanisms deeply rooted in organizational sociology—specifically, the dominance of bureaucratic logic over professional autonomy, and the institutional pressures that enforce compliance over educational purpose. Drawing on Weber’s (1922/1978) theory of bureaucracy, which emphasizes hierarchical control, rule-based standardization, and instrumental rationality, we can unpack how administrative colonization operates not merely as a set of tasks, but as a systemic logic that displaces the professional norms of homeroom teacher.

Weber (1922/1978) argued that modern bureaucracies thrive on formalized rules, hierarchical authority, and the pursuit of efficiency, often at the expense of substantive goals. This dynamic is starkly evident in homeroom teachers’ work: administrative tasks—from patriotic health campaigns to poverty alleviation and epidemic prevention—have expanded to dominate their daily routines, with little connection to their core professional responsibilities of student mentorship, class management, or educational guidance. Such expansion reflects what DiMaggio and Powell (1983) termed coercive isomorphism: schools, as organizations embedded in a broader state-led education system, impose administrative mandates on homeroom teachers to secure legitimacy with higher authorities, regardless of whether these mandates serve educational goals. The result is a form of “campaign-style governance” (Zhou et al., 2013), where symbolic compliance with policy directives replaces meaningful engagement with students—undermining the very purpose of homeroom work.

This displacement of professional logic by bureaucratic demands increases emotional labor (Lavian, 2011) and creates a state of “organized hypocrisy” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), where schools formally adhere to administrative rules while teachers privately recognize their irrelevance to education. Teacher Shang’s lament captures this tension: “A policy comes down every now and then… We have to complete tasks unrelated to the class, such as poverty alleviation initiatives. Are they really useful? Not necessarily.”

His observation echoes Lipsky’s (1980) concept of “street-level bureaucrats”—frontline workers who navigate the gap between rigid rules and on-the-ground realities. Homeroom teachers, as street-level bureaucrats in education, are caught between two irreconcilable demands: fulfilling administrative mandates to maintain institutional legitimacy, and upholding their professional commitment to students—with the former increasingly crowding out the latter.

The hierarchical structure of school administration exacerbates this colonization. As Weber (1922/1978) noted, bureaucratic authority rests on the assumption that lower-level actors will defer to higher-level directives, and this is enforced through numerical evaluations, mandatory meetings, and punitive accountability measures. Homeroom teachers describe their work as “entirely subordinate to administrative directives,” with every task—from reporting formats to meeting schedules—dictated by layers of authority. This aligns with Chen and Zhao’s (2022) finding that administrative overload reduces both efficiency and job satisfaction, but organizational sociology deepens this analysis: the issue is not merely “too much work,” but the colonization of professional judgment—where decisions about what constitutes “good teaching” are no longer guided by educational expertise, but by compliance with bureaucratic rules.

For example, the emphasis on quantifiable metrics (e.g., report submission rates, meeting attendance) over qualitative outcomes (e.g., student well-being, class cohesion) reflects what Meyer and Rowan (1977) called the “myth and ceremony” of bureaucracy: organizations adopt formal structures not for their practical value, but to signal conformity to societal expectations. Homeroom teachers, in turn, are pressured to prioritize these ceremonial tasks—spending hours on data entry or policy meetings—even as they recognize their disconnect from student needs. As Teacher Shang noted, “We’re juggling multiple roles and running around like crazy,” yet this busyness serves bureaucratic legitimacy more than educational impact.

In sum, administrative colonization operates through a confluence of bureaucratic mechanisms: coercive isomorphism enforcing policy compliance, hierarchical authority displacing professional judgment, and ceremonial rules overshadowing substantive goals. This systemic logic does not merely add tasks to homeroom teachers’ workloads—it redefines the very meaning of their professionalism, reducing them to implementers of administrative mandates rather than autonomous educators.

Training Disembedding

The position of a homeroom teacher in secondary school is a specialized teaching role that requires dedicated training for self-development and innovation. Continuously promoting the professional skills training and development of homeroom teachers has a significant boosting effect on improving the quality of their work (Vu, 2022). In terms of homeroom teacher growth and support, the country has launched a national training program for primary and secondary homeroom teachers. In 2022, Hebei Province implemented 11 various training projects for primary and secondary homeroom teachers, with a total participation of over 80,000 people. However, the actual support effect does not seem to be proportional to the large-scale investment. Most homeroom teacher training is assigned through a “rotating” system, with little opportunity for teachers to customize the content according to their own needs, making professional growth a difficult journey. Additionally, the training content lacks a systematic approach and has low applicability, tending to replicate and imitate experiences from developed cities, rather than addressing the root issues faced by homeroom teachers in county-level schools. Teacher training has even become an administrative task and a source of frustration for homeroom teachers.

Teacher Tong is a homeroom teacher with over 5 years of experience and has participated in almost all of the important homeroom teacher training programs. She once represented the school in the selection of excellent homeroom teachers organized by the county education commission. She said:

There is a significant difference between the educational environment in cities and that in counties. Many of the student management methods taught in training are not applicable. At first, I tried to imitate and apply them, but later found that they couldn’t be implemented. Over time, I stopped trying. As someone who relies on experience, I have my own set of solutions for students’ difficult problems. Young homeroom teachers, however, lack growth opportunities. Especially when the training lacks content and effectiveness, they gradually become reluctant to participate.

Schools encourage homeroom teachers to participate in training, but pay little attention to the effectiveness and practical application of the training, making it difficult to truly achieve the goal of strengthening the construction of the homeroom teacher team. At the same time, there is a lack of connection between pre-service and in-service training, and pre-service training is not yet widely available, resulting in homeroom teachers generally starting their jobs in a “learning by doing” state. The training mechanism for homeroom teachers is not well-established, and teachers’ personal wishes are not fully respected.

Rigid Assessment

In real educational practice, some secondary schools employ stringent methods for daily assessment of homeroom teachers, subjecting them to comprehensive and multi-faceted supervision. Teacher Chen commented on the assessment process: and even using rigorous evaluation indicators to rigidly assess the work of secondary school homeroom teachers, which invisibly increases the burden on them. At the same time, some secondary schools are accustomed to using performance-based evaluations to assess the work of homeroom teachers. However, this type of performance-based evaluation focuses on assessing the daily work processes of homeroom teachers but tends to overlook the complexity and intricacy of their work. Much of a homeroom teacher’s work is essentially a “conscientious task” with “soft” characteristics, where the implicit work content often outweighs the explicit work tasks. Moreover, homeroom teachers in fact bear excessive responsibilities, and this “unlimited responsibility” does not entirely suit many current evaluation methods. Teacher Chen commented on the assessment process:

Every semester, the school provides us with a homeroom teacher’s workbook, which requires comprehensive records in various aspects. However, the leaders do not conduct spot checks on it, nor is it included in the performance evaluation indicators for homeroom teachers. Therefore, we only find time to fill it in after the semester ends. We are too busy with various tasks during the semester to keep up with it regularly. We only write when we remember, and then fill in the rest all at once. Only in the years when there are teaching inspections do we particularly take the time to organize materials. Teaching inspections occur once every 3 or 4 years, and during those times, we frantically make up teaching materials and various records. However, the content related to homeroom teachers’ work is basically not examined; teaching quality is the main focus. Therefore, our daily work primarily emphasizes student grades. Good student performance and high graduation rates truly indicate that a homeroom teacher is doing a good job.

Assessment is an important means of school management and a flag that guides the behavior of homeroom teachers, directing their work orientation and adjusting their work enthusiasm. What the school assesses in management is what the homeroom teachers focus on, and to what extent the assessment is conducted determines the extent to which the homeroom teachers strive. Guided by established interests, the direct goal of homeroom teachers in implementing work around the assessment content is to improve their assessment scores. In the practice of Shui secondary school performance management goals, the student management aspect of homeroom teachers’ work has also been invisibly oriented toward a “grades-first” approach. In their work, homeroom teachers prioritize student grades as the first consideration, leading to intense “arms races” in grade rankings among classes (Shi, 2021). The hierarchical class management system implemented by the school has become a driving factor for homeroom teachers to strive for better grades. Only when there is a substantial improvement in student grades can an individual’s work be considered ultimately successful, earning recognition from students, parents, school leaders, and other stakeholders.

Insufficient Motivation

A flexible and reasonable incentive mechanism is a crucial factor in promoting the high-quality development of homeroom teachers’ work (Ye et al., 2021). On the one hand, the current salary and allowance system for homeroom teachers is not well-established. The subsidies and performance-based pay for homeroom teachers are relatively low, and despite the hierarchical setup for homeroom teachers, the salary and allowances still prioritize professional titles, without a more reasonable and feasible allowance standard in place. Furthermore, the available local financial support is extremely limited. The inadequate performance management system for homeroom teachers directly results in a lack of incentives in the current salary structure, reducing the sustainability of homeroom teachers’ passion and motivation for their work (Zhou et al., 2024). This, to a certain extent, exacerbates job burnout among homeroom teachers.

Teacher Cao believes that although the homeroom teacher has invested a lot of time and energy, the allowance received lacks corresponding encouragement:

Homeroom teachers also have to double as life counselors and safety supervisors, checking dormitories, accompanying students during morning exercises, and supervising self-study sessions. It feels like we’re running on a perpetual motion machine, working 24/7. However, the salary is pitifully low. We receive a homeroom teacher allowance of 300 yuan plus a 30 yuan subsidy for each shift. With soaring prices, our take-home pay is far from keeping up with the cost of meat. I remember once, when we went for training in the city, it was a long way and the weather was extremely cold. Several of us teachers thought about taking a taxi, but it was too expensive, so we endured it. The school’s finance department is also in a difficult situation, with no extra funds to reimburse us. The monthly subsidies are so minimal that, honestly, they’re not even enough to cover the phone bills for communicating with parents. Sometimes, I want to invest more effort into my work, but when I think about the pitifully low homeroom teacher allowance, I lose the motivation to persist.

On the other hand, the existing system for evaluating and awarding professional titles in secondary schools still includes practices such as “seniority-based promotion” and “pulling strings” to obtain higher-level titles. The experience of serving as a homeroom teacher is not directly linked to title evaluation, making it difficult to recognize the advantages of experienced homeroom teachers, which essentially creates a certain degree of unfairness. Many teachers take on the role of homeroom teachers with the mindset of accumulating teaching and management experience and enhancing their professional qualities (Shi & Leuwerke, 2010). However, when they discover that their experience as homeroom teachers does not help them achieve significant career development, they may become disheartened and unable to fully commit themselves to the role. The deficiencies in incentive mechanisms, such as salary and title evaluation, have become another important factor contributing to the lack of drive among homeroom teachers.

On My Own

As an important part of the reform and development of basic education, the work of homeroom teachers is embedded in the overall education system and requires strong social support to sustain its development momentum. Currently, the campus ecosystem has not yet formed an atmosphere that values the role of homeroom teachers. Homeroom teachers are burdened with responsibilities such as moral education, safety, and epidemic prevention, yet they lack certain autonomous management and educational disciplinary powers. “No one stands up for homeroom teachers,” and “when something goes wrong, they are criticized by leaders, blamed by parents, and remembered with hostility by students.” The status of homeroom teachers in the campus ecosystem still needs to be improved (Weidberg & Ceobanu, 2024).

In addition, at the level of home school cooperation, parents’ support for the work of homeroom teachers is insufficient, mostly staying at the level of mutual communication to complete tasks (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2023). When talking about home school co-education, Teacher Bai said:

Parents’ lack of understanding and cooperation is the most challenging aspect for homeroom teachers. In county towns, parents’ educational background is not as strong, so many things need to be explained thoroughly and communicated bit by bit in WeChat groups. Sometimes when we need to meet with parents, they might think it’s not their child’s fault but rather the homeroom teacher’s failure to manage and educate properly. It’s really hard to express how frustrating this is. There are also situations where children from divorced families ask for money from both parents and then blame the homeroom teachers for not knowing about it in time, or during the pandemic, parents blame the class advisor for not supervising enough, or even file complaints against the homeroom teacher. Moreover, parents have very high educational expectations and only focus on their children’s grades, which puts a lot of psychological pressure on us and makes it difficult to carry out work with parents.

Professional support derived from daily educational life is a crucial guarantee for homeroom teachers to complete their work with high quality. However, the reality that homeroom teachers have to face is the weakness of professional support. In the process of generating work burden for homeroom teachers, a significant reason lies in the lack of support from relevant stakeholders such as schools, students, and their parents, which easily leads to negative emotions among homeroom teachers when bearing their workload, invisibly increasing the difficulty of their work and making it easier for their workload to turn into a burden. More seriously, in the absence of organizational and peer support, some homeroom teachers have started to shirk many tasks and even developed a “going through the motions” attitude towards work.

Conclusion and Discussion

This study has explored the everyday professional experiences of homeroom teachers in a county-level secondary school in North China, revealing a vicious cycle of job alienation, compliance burden, interweaving of practical and superficial work, and strategism, shaped by administrative expansion, training disembedding, rigid assessment, insufficient motivation, and lack of social support. By centering the subjective narratives of frontline educators, this research sheds light on the structural contradictions between policy rhetoric of professionalization and the lived realities of teachers navigating institutional constraints. Below, we contextualize these findings within existing literature to highlight their theoretical and empirical contributions.

First, the finding that homeroom teachers experience profound job alienation resonates with Seeman’s (1959) classic framework, which identifies powerlessness and meaninglessness as core dimensions of alienation. Seeman’s analysis of workplace detachment is amplified in our study: homeroom teachers’ loss of control over their work—overwhelmed by trivial administrative tasks and disconnected from educational missions—mirrors his assertion that alienation arises when individuals are stripped of agency in shaping their labor. This aligns with Lavian (2011), who found that organizational climates dominated by rigid demands exacerbate burnout among teachers, particularly when their work is decoupled from their professional values. Our data extend this by showing how alienation in rural contexts is intensified by spatial and temporal boundlessness: teachers’ responsibilities spill into homes and holidays, eroding the distinction between work and personal life (Lee, 2015).

Second, the compliance burden documented here—characterized by 24/7 availability, excessive paperwork, and stifled autonomy—echoes Baeriswyl et al.’s (2021) observation that bureaucratic overload undermines teachers’ emotional well-being. However, our study reveals a unique layer of complexity in county-level schools: the “ambiguity of role definition” (Liu & Barnhart, 1999) amplifies compliance pressures. Unlike urban contexts where role boundaries may be more formalized, homeroom teachers in county navigate overlapping identities as instructors, administrators, and surrogate caregivers, with little institutional guidance—exacerbating their sense of powerlessness. This aligns with Chen and Zhao’s (2022) finding that administrative colonization of teaching work reduces both efficiency and job satisfaction, but our data show this effect is magnified when resources are scarce and policy implementation is decentralized.

Third, the interweaving of practical and superficial work—exemplified by pandemic-era data reporting rituals—resonates with Zhou et al.’s (2013) model of “muddling through” in Chinese bureaucracy, where symbolic compliance replaces substantive implementation. However, our study adds nuance: rural homeroom teachers are not merely passive actors but “strategic negotiators” who balance formal demands with local realities. This echoes Beck’s (2008) analysis of “discursive control,” where teachers internalize state norms, but we further show that this internalization coexists with pragmatic adaptation—for example, prioritizing visible tasks like publicity over deep engagement with students—revealing a more contradictory form of agency than previously documented.

Fourth, the prevalence of strategism—including data falsification and tacit collusion with schools—extends Zhao’s (2014) insights into the teacher-state relationship. Zhao argues that the state’s emphasis on professionalism masks subtle control mechanisms, and our findings support this: teachers’ complicity in symbolic compliance (e.g., fabricating contest entries) reflects the internalization of state expectations to prioritize institutional reputation over educational integrity. This aligns with Shi’s (2021) observation that “grades-first” assessment systems drive performative behavior, but our data highlight a county-urban divide: in resource-constrained settings, such strategism becomes a survival strategy, not merely a response to accountability pressures.

On the other hand, this study advances existing literature in three key ways. First, it extends the Person-Environment (P-E) framework (Lawton & Nahemow, 1973) to educational contexts, demonstrating how the “fit” between teachers’ competencies and their environment is fractured by institutional logics of instrumental rationality. Unlike studies focusing on student outcomes (Wang & Yang, 2020), we show that poor P-E fit for teachers—rooted in misaligned policies and inadequate support—generates systemic dissonance that undermines both professional identity and practice.

Second, it challenges the dichotomy between “passive compliance” and “active resistance” in teacher agency research. Our findings reveal a middle ground: homeroom teachers are neither fully compliant nor openly resistant but engage in “strategic accommodation”—adapting to structural constraints while preserving fragments of professional meaning. This complicates Sapir and Mizrahi-Shtelman’s (2023) focus on “care expertise” as a source of empowerment, showing that in resource-poor contexts, such expertise is often subordinated to survival tactics.

Third, it highlights the value of “extreme cases” in uncovering mechanisms obscured in privileged settings. The amplified structural constraints in county schools—weak resources, rigid policy implementation, and limited professional support—make visible the latent contradictions of homeroom teacher work that are muted in urban research (Okumura, 2017). This suggests that county contexts serve as critical sites for understanding the general logic of educational governance, not merely local anomalies.

At last, the findings underscore the need to reform the operational mechanisms of the homeroom teacher system, not abolish it (contra calls to discard the system due to workload burdens). Policy interventions should address: (1) clarifying role boundaries to reduce administrative colonization (Chen & Zhao, 2022); (2) designing contextually relevant training (Vu, 2022) that bridges urban-county divides; (3) reforming assessment systems to value “soft” work like student mentorship over quantifiable metrics (Ye et al., 2021); and (4) strengthening social support networks, including home-school collaboration (Sapir & Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2023).

Of course, this study is not without limitations. Its focus on a single county school limits generalizability, though the extreme case design prioritizes theoretical transferability over statistical representativeness. Future research could compare county and urban contexts to explore how institutional logics interact with local resources, or examine collective teacher agency—for example, whether unions or professional networks mitigate individual burdens (Stevenson, 2007).

In conclusion, this study demonstrates that homeroom teachers’ everyday experiences are not idiosyncratic but reflect deeper tensions between policy ideals and grassroots realities. By amplifying their voices, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of educational professionalism—one that acknowledges both constraint and agency, and underscores the urgency of centering teachers’ well-being in education reform. As Sapir and Mizrahi-Shtelman (2024) note, meaningful progress in education requires recognizing teachers not just as implementers of policy, but as critical stakeholders whose professional lives shape the very ecosystems they are tasked with nurturing.