New Review: Student Mentoring Only Sticks When Schools Build It Into Their DNA
Elevri, P. A., Ruyadi, Y., Nurdin, E. S., Dahliyana, A., Juntika, & Samad, M. A. (2026). Institutionalizing a culture of student mentoring within a whole-school approach: An integrative literature review with a systematic search. Kasta: Jurnal Ilmu Sosial, Ekonomi, Agama, Budaya dan Terapan, 6(2), 1451–1468. https://doi.org/10.58218/kasta.v6i2.3561
Introduction
Schools worldwide are being asked to do more than teach academics, they’re expected to build character, protect mental health, and create a sense of belonging. Elevri et al. (2026) argue that student mentoring sits at the center of this expanded mission, but that most research treats it narrowly, either as a personal bond between teacher and student or as a standalone program, rather than as something that must be built into how a school actually operates. The authors set out to synthesize fragmented literature on teacher-student relationships, school climate, and implementation science into a single framework explaining how mentoring becomes lasting school culture rather than one teacher’s individual effort.
Methods
This is an integrative literature review with a systematic search, not a meta-analysis or program evaluation. The authors searched ERIC, Crossref, DOAJ, Google Scholar, Garuda, and SINTA-indexed Indonesian journals, organizing their search into four clusters: relational mechanisms, school conditions, institutional factors, and the Indonesian policy context. Sources were classified into peer-reviewed studies, anchor theories, Indonesian contextual literature, and policy documents, then synthesized thematically across three axes.
Results
Relationships without institutional backing remain fragile and teacher-dependent, while institutional mandates without genuine relational quality remain administratively hollow. The first layer, relational mechanisms, covers the teacher-student bond itself along with related constructs like school connectedness, school belonging, and student engagement. The second layer, school conditions, explains why some schools sustain these relational benefits and others don’t. Character education, school culture, and student well-being frameworks like Konu’s (2002) model round out this layer, each pointing to the same conclusion: the environment around a relationship determines whether that relationship can do its work consistently. The third layer, institutional factors, is where the review’s central argument sharpens. Durlak and DuPre (2008) and Prenger et al. (2022) show that implementation quality, leadership support, and organizational routines determine whether a promising practice survives past its pilot phase. Elevri and colleagues stress that institutionalization is not the same as writing a policy or assigning a title; it requires that mentoring become embedded in scheduling, coordination, supervision, and shared ownership across staff, or it risks depending entirely on which individual teacher happens to care.
Discussion
Much of the existing literature, they note, supports language about association, protective factors, and potential mechanisms, but not language about direct causation or universal effectiveness. This caution becomes especially important in their treatment of Indonesia’s guidance and counseling reforms. The emergence of the “Guru Wali” (Homeroom Teacher) role, alongside longstanding Class Advisor and Guidance Counselor positions, and the “7 Jurus BK Hebat” (“7 Great Guidance Strategies”) program, offers a live policy context for interpreting the international literature. But the authors are firm that policy documents describing these roles cannot stand in as evidence that the roles work. They deliberately avoid treating Homeroom Teachers as interchangeable with Class Advisors, and insist that Guidance Counselors remain the core professional actors for assessment, counseling, and referral, with newer roles complementing rather than replacing that professional function. The Indonesian material, in the authors’ own framing, serves to illustrate urgency and translation potential, not to prove that any specific reform has succeeded. The authors also revisit the concept of fidelity versus adaptation, arguing these are partners rather than opposites. A mentoring practice copied rigidly without adjustment to local school context risks ignoring real constraints; a practice adapted too loosely risks losing the core principles that made it effective anywhere. Sustainable institutionalization, in their view, requires holding both firmly.
Implications for Mentoring Programs
Schools should resist treating mentoring as an add-on program and instead integrate it into scheduling, coordination, and leadership routines, with clearly distinguished roles for teachers, homeroom teachers, and guidance counselors. If mentoring functions are folded into a teacher’s workload without dedicated time, referral pathways, or leadership backing, the practice tends to remain fragile and dependent on whichever staff member happens to be personally invested. Programs and policymakers should also resist collapsing distinct roles into one another. The review is emphatic that homeroom teachers, class advisors, and guidance counselors serve different functions, and that expanding one role’s guidance responsibilities should not be mistaken for replacing the specialized training and function that guidance counselors provide. Clarity about who does what, and how those roles coordinate, matters as much as the existence of any single mentoring role. Finally, evaluators and administrators should measure institutionalization by more than the existence of a policy document or standard operating procedure. The presence of an SOP is not evidence that a mentoring culture exists; genuine institutionalization shows up in whether practices persist when key personnel change, whether staff report a sense of ownership rather than compliance, and whether the practice adapts sensibly to local constraints while preserving its core relational intent.
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