Early Career Teachers Research Articles

How early career teachers overcome everyday work-related challenges: an analysis from the perspective of teacher buoyancy

ABSTRACT Drawing on the concept of teacher buoyancy which is teachers’ capacity to deal with the everyday challenges that most teachers face in their teaching, this qualitative study investigates the capacity of ten early career teachers to derive sustenance from overcoming minor and frequent challenges in their everyday work. A semi-structured interview was used to investigate early career teachers’ adaptive and proactive experiences dealing with frequent challenges at work. Findings indicated that early career teachers utilised problem-focused strategies, cognitive-related strategies, and well-being and emotion-related strategies, and mobilised different personal and contextual resources to sustain themselves in the realities of their professional work and life. This study advocates the enhancement of teacher buoyancy as a capacity among early career teachers to empower them to stay on top of recurrent problems, and suggests potential implications for teacher education programmes and professional development for early career teachers.

Early Career Teachers with Mentoring during the Induction Phase: Assessments of the Mentoring Relationship and Design of the Mentoring Process

In this article, the results of a survey of early career teachers on their experience with and perception mentorship during their first year of teaching are examined using a quantitative approach. A total of 100 early career teachers (80% female) of which 43 taught at primary school level participated in the study. Half of those surveyed agreed that mentors should be implemented during the induction phase. Primary school teachers, however, were less likely to not need any further mentoring to improve their quality of teaching beyond the induction phase (p=0.028; p=0.007). In general participants rated the mentoring relationship as a particularly trusting collegial and exemplary supportive working relationship. Nevertheless, more primary school teachers considered their mentors to be motivated for carrying out their task compared to secondary school mentees (p=0.036). Half of the respondents already recognized a personal learning success or further development process through the mentoring process in the induction phase. Taken together these results provide initial insights into the benefits of a mentoring process for novice teachers during their first year and highlight some benefits along with some concerns regarding this process.

Addressing Attrition: Multi-Level Mentorship Model

Mentorship has been identified as a protective factor in early career special education teacher retention. These mentorships can be formal or informal during teachers’ first years of teaching and can support teachers in various aspects of their careers, such as navigating required paperwork and instructional practices. However, these mentorships should be individualized and consistently provided to be meaningful. To address the inconsistent mentorships that early career teachers may receive, we propose a model in which early career teachers are supported by a network of alumni to both support and retain the early career special education teaching force. In turn, the alumni are supported by university faculty in mentorship skills to fill gaps in administrative roles where special education expertise is needed. By providing support to both groups of special educators (e.g., early career, mid to late career), we hope to address the shortage of special educators by improving attrition rates of early career special educators while concurrently encouraging and promoting leadership roles for in-service special educators, filling the critical need of administrators with special education expertise.

Mentorship reconsidered: A case study of K-12 teachers' mentor-mentee relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study critically examined the impact of a crisis context (COVID-19 pandemic) on K-12 teachers by placing emphasis on the mentor-mentee dyad through the perspective of the mentee in a large United States public school system. A phenomenological case study was undertaken that used semi-structured interviews to examine 14 early career teachers (mentees) participating in a formal mentoring program during the 2020-2021 school year. The study focused on mentor-mentee relationships by accounting for the single most traumatic and transformative event of the modern era of K-12 public education. The analysis yielded three findings highlighting the impact of COVID-19 on the mentor-mentee dyadic experiences of first- and second-year teachers engaged in a mentoring relationship. The findings indicate that (a) e-mentoring allowed for avoidant behaviors from mentors (b) successful mentoring involves the development of personal relationships between a mentor and mentee, and (c) peer and reverse mentoring became commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public school systems can use these findings to help develop positive mentor and mentee relationships that go beyond the traditional dyadic roles and help reduce stress in a crisis context, while developing a culture where superiority bias is improved. Research implications offer mentoring literature a view to pay more attention to temporal influences during environments of high stress, which may provide more explanatory power on mentorship roles, cultural influences, and social interactions in the course of mentor-mentee practices.

The Link Between Expertise, the Cognitive Demands of Teacher Noticing and, Experience in Teaching Mathematics in Secondary Schools

Teacher noticing, a situation-specific part of teachers’ professional competence, has gained much importance in the past two decades. The construct is believed to play a crucial role in the transfer of knowledge and skills into professional teaching performance. However, there is little empirical evidence on how the length of teachers’ teaching experience affects the development of expertise in teacher noticing. In particular, little research has been conducted on the development of facets of teacher noticing—namely perception, interpretation, and decision-making—as well as the handling of cognitive demands while applying teacher noticing. To fill this research gap, the present study investigates the teacher noticing of master’s students, early-career teachers, and experienced teachers in the context of secondary mathematics via cross-sectional comparison. Teacher noticing skills and differences between the three groups are analyzed based on participants’ ability to deal with the cognitive demands of an established video-based teacher noticing instrument. The results suggest significant increases in teacher noticing from students to in-service teachers, especially in mathematic-specific areas. Hardly any significant differences were found between early-career and experienced teachers, which suggests a stagnation in teacher noticing skills. However, the early-career teachers showed better performance in decision-making and mathematics-related items as well as knowledge-based items related to recent topics from mathematics pedagogy and general pedagogy. This result emphasizes the importance of knowledge prerequisites for the development of expertise in teacher noticing. It also highlights that expertise development is not directly connected to the length of teaching experience.

Columns: The Future Is Now: Lessons in Verse: The Hiddenness of Poetry

Reading the work of other poets and sharing drafts of her poems helped an early career teacher reflect on what she has learned about teaching poetry.

Early-career music teachers’ perspectives of their initial teacher education program in China

Initial teacher education plays an important role in preparing music teachers for schools. There is a growing interest in Chinese music teacher education, though limited research currently exists. This study investigated early-career teachers’ perspectives concerning the efficacy of the initial music teacher education program at Yu Cai Normal University (pseudonym), China. This mixed-methods study used a sequential explanatory design where qualitative interview data were used to provide further explanation and detail regarding survey results. The perceptions of early-career music teachers were sought on the importance, effectiveness, and usefulness of their initial teacher education and the most rewarding and challenging aspects of their beginning careers. Phase 1 of the data collection consisted of an online survey with 32 music education graduates of Yu Cai Normal University from 2015–2019. Phase 2 involved one-on-one semi-structured online interviews with three participants offering a range of views. Phase 3 was a combined analysis and discussion of the findings from Phases 1 and 2. Findings indicate that early-career music teachers highly valued their initial teacher education and their studies adequately prepared them for work, though the quality of their university subjects could still be improved. Early-career music teachers embrace the challenges of the profession and choir, competitions, and the act of teaching are their greatest rewards. Practical subjects remain the most critical components of music teacher education, and theory must be situated in contextualized practice.

Walking-creating for fostering teachers’ education in peripheral coastal communities

ABSTRACT Walking-creating was adopted to probe orientations towards communities, while early career teachers were on clinical placement in the remote South West Peninsular of England. The aim of carrying out walking-creating events was to elicit whether and if so, the extent to which, early career teachers were sensitive to the communities where they had been placed and hence had begun to question deficit discourses tending to adhere to peripheral landscapes. We explored whether they were replacing these negative discourses with hopeful ones. We present a study of one early career teacher who during our creative activity disclosed how place awareness had been developing through interactions within the community. The novel walking-creating methodology is informed by a generative theorising of peripherality so as to contextualise the complexities of the multiple drivers likely to be coalescing in teachers’ peripheral placement communities.

Language teacher preparation, induction and retention: unpacking two decades of research

ABSTRACT Language teachers come from diverse and multilingual backgrounds. This also generally characterises preparation programmes that have been developed to prepare elementary and secondary school language teachers for increasingly globalised, pluralistic, interconnected classrooms. Despite variations, there is value in attempting to identify common denominators in research related to the preparation of such teachers. This paper surveys 20 years of research published in journals focusing on language learning and teaching. Content analysis and thematic analysis was performed to generate salient categories related to language teacher preparation, induction and retention. Five key themes emerged: reflective practice and its role in preparation programmes and induction; ongoing formal and informal support in the early years of teaching; teachers’ beliefs and their identity; pedagogical and content knowledge; and the sociocultural context of teaching. Despite the focus on journals devoted to language learning and teaching, findings overwhelmingly related to teacher preparation in general. We discuss these findings and then offer suggestions specifically for school L2 language teacher preparation, induction and retention with an emphasis on early career teachers. Such recommendations can guide language teacher preparation programmes as well as the professional trajectory of teachers in the field, ultimately increasing the chances of retention in the long term.

A qualitative analysis of agriculture teacher’s attitudinal changes toward the teaching profession in the first three years of teaching

This longitudinal qualitative phenomenological case study seeks to understand beginning agriculture teachers’ experiences and how their attitudes toward teaching evolve over time. The research included visits to the teachers’ facilities, monthly interviews, reflection exercises, and focus groups. Initial coding included magnitude and in vivo coding methods followed by rounds of focused, axial, and theoretical coding. Based on the individual and collective experiences of the eight teachers gathered monthly over three years, their experiences at the beginning of the year followed a similar path to prior studies. However, following the mid-fall semester “slump” the agriculture teachers in their first, second, and third years had a different experience than prior studies suggested. They experienced a second spring semester “slump” in their attitude toward teaching. While some teachers finished the year strong, others struggled to the end. The teachers described their attitudes toward teaching as more extreme in the monthly interviews but held an overall positive attitude toward teaching when reflecting on the year as a whole at the conclusion of each of the three years. Facilitators of early career teacher support programs should become aware of the highs and lows beginning teachers face and develop programs to help them navigate the challenging times. Recommendations for future research included conducting a similar study with a more diverse population of teachers in a variety of schools and communities.

School-based mandates versus teacher autonomy: three early career teacher viewpoints of leadership impacting the teaching of reading

This paper reports on three Victorian early career Foundation to Year Two (F-2) teachers and the impact of leadership on their daily pedagogic decision-making about the teaching of reading. Data sets from each teacher drew on observations of three of their reading lessons and researcher-generated field notes, a semi-structured teacher interview, an online survey of reported teacher practice, teacher planning documents of the observed lessons and classroom artefacts related to reading. Selected from a wider qualitative case study undertaken with 16 F-2 teachers across six government primary sites in metropolitan Melbourne, the teachers in this paper reported on how mandated and non-negotiable principles and practices of reading affected their ability to make daily pedagogic decisions for their students. As a result of leadership directives, the three teachers expressed frustration at the lack of opportunity for teacher voice and autonomy in their craft of teaching. If the teaching profession wishes to continue to renew its numbers and promote the teaching profession as an ongoing career of choice, the focus on the professional development of early career teachers is timely and necessary. Therefore, this paper aims to shine a light on the importance of instructional leadership models which support the development of teacher knowledge, teacher efficacy and teacher satisfaction, ultimately resulting in more targeted outcomes for students and more teachers likely to remain in the profession.

A mismatch: Why non-tenured teachers are ill-prepared to deal with the perceived job insecurity of students in the humanities

Most of the instructional workforce within the humanities in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and The Netherlands comprises non-tenure track appointments. This commentary is a starting point in thinking about what the meaning and consequences are of far-reaching casualization for humanities education. Based on my experience as a supervisor of non-tenured early-career teachers in the humanities and on an international exploration of the position of the so-called precariat, I describe the competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, discourses on the importance of the humanities for society and the labour market which these non-tenured teachers must navigate. These discourses put especially non-tenured academics, who are themselves in a very precarious, in an even more disempowered space that is not only detrimental to these non-tenured teachers but also to the students who must learn to deal with perceived job insecurity.

The “problem” of teacher quality: exploring challenges and opportunities in developing teacher quality during the Covid-19 global pandemic in England

ABSTRACT Teachers and teacher education are often presented as “problems” to be solved, with policy solutions that focus on ways to make teachers “better” and improve teacher “quality” by introducing prescriptive strategies. We investigate the ways Covid-19-related changes to university and school-based facets of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England influence teacher quality in relation to both student teachers and early career teachers, working in secondary schools. Drawing on 34 interviews with school leaders, school mentors and ITE tutors, we critically explore the ways in which teacher quality was developed through key aspects of teachers’ pedagogy and practice during the pandemic crisis when schools were closed and teaching moved online. Our findings show that the pandemic crisis has highlighted the different facets of teacher quality which arguably disrupt narrow and prescriptive understandings of what constitutes “quality” in policy terms. Although there were many instances of challenge in the development of new and student teachers, our data also shows how ITE tutors, school mentors and leaders responded creatively to the crisis. Participants highlighted the opportunities afforded by the pandemic to develop diverse and innovative pedagogies and practice, enhance students’ subject knowledge, as well as overcome some of the challenges in other areas of pedagogy and practice. Furthermore, the study shows that teacher quality was not substantially reduced despite the challenges arising from the pandemic and concerns that pre-service teachers would not be ready and prepared for a career in the classroom.

Perceived network bridging influences the career commitment decisions of early career teachers

BackgroundRetaining highly qualified science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers is imperative for meeting demands of the twenty-first century STEM workforce. While multiple studies have revealed several factors that influence teacher retention, little work has examined how these factors interact with one another. This study explored the relationship between two critical factors that relate to teachers’ decisions to remain in the profession: teacher identity and communities of practice (CoP) networks.ResultsDrawing upon scholarship on science teacher identity, CoP, and social network theory, we demonstrate a quantitative relationship between perceived network bridging roles and career commitment, which is mediated through teacher identity.ConclusionsThe findings from this study have both implications for scholarship in teacher retention and science teacher identity development. Potential solutions for improving novice teachers’ self-image through providing opportunities to grow their professional networks both locally and regionally/nationally are suggested.

Learning to Teach Responsively Through Asynchronous Collaborative Discourse Around Video Records of Practice

Teaching practices that are responsive to student thinking are complex and challenging to learn, particularly for novice teachers. Skilled responsive teaching involves adaptive expertise, or the ability to deliberate about and respond to students’ emergent ideas. This study explored the learning of early-career teachers through participation in a video-feedback inquiry group around the enactment of a number talk routine introduced in preservice teacher education. Conceptualizing teacher learning as socially situated within a discourse community, we consider how participation in the asynchronous inquiry group supported both collective interpretations and individual growth in implementing responsive instructional practices. Findings suggest that giving and receiving asynchronous feedback provided novice teachers with opportunities to engage in dialogic conversations that involved several types of deliberation related to responsive teaching and the development of adaptive expertise. This study provides evidence of the potential of asynchronous teacher inquiry groups and the importance of giving, as well as receiving, feedback on practice.

Re-imagining teacher mentoring for the future

ABSTRACT Teachers are dealing with a profession characterised by rapidly evolving educational research, societal shifts, and political agendas. They are faced with unforeseen events that create educational futures that are yet unknown, with the global pandemic a clear example. Mentoring has a long history as an approach to support teachers, particularly those in the early stages of their careers, to navigate the challenges of the profession and build professional capacity. The unprecedented complexity of the current educational landscape demands now, more than ever, that mentoring for early career teachers (ECTs) extends beyond standards-driven capacity building to nurture future-focused dispositions. This paper conceptualises the Future-focused Mentoring model (FfM) for the current educational context, framed by the intellectual virtues for the transformation of self, relationships, and teacher practice that leverages and celebrates intellectual imagination, courage, open-mindedness, and tenacity. In proposing this model, we draw on a strong theoretical and empirical base to articulate the principles of a mentoring model that is relational, mindful and future-focused. This model has been conceptualised as a way forward to support and sustain ECTs’ effectiveness for the future and longevity in the profession.

Early career teachers’ expansion of professional learning networks with social media

ABSTRACT Early career teachers (ECTs) face numerous challenges during their transition from preparation programmes into professional employment contexts. Social media platforms have created many new opportunities for teachers’ ongoing professional learning by putting them in contact with other teachers from anywhere in the world. However, being connected to more people also means that ECTs must navigate an increased number of potentially conflicting messages about what and how to teach. Thus, entering the profession presents ECTs external conflicts as they adjust to new colleagues and internal conflicts as they encounter cognitive dissonance between old and new ideas. This study explores how and why ECTs expand professional learning networks (PLNs) – that is, the supports, people and spaces useful for improving teaching and learning – with social media in response to early career challenges. Interviews with nine ECTs demonstrate that they expand PLNs to navigate change, scarcity of resources and conflicting teaching beliefs. Interviewees use social media to look for supports for instructional practise and for connecting socially, but they also described how they maintain boundaries around their social media use. Implications are discussed for ECTs, administrators and education leaders – especially regarding how stakeholders can help alleviate early career pressures on ECTs.

Early Childhood Teachers’ Confidence to Teach Religious Education and the Influences Which Impact Their Teaching of Religious Education in Catholic Primary Schools

This article reports findings from a study that examines the factors which influence early childhood and care (ECEC) early career teachers’ confidence in teaching Religious Education (RE) and how it impacts their teaching of RE in Catholic primary schools in Western Australia. Teachers’ confidence is a teacher’s belief in their ability to accomplish a goal and refers to strength of belief. Research in this area has shown that confidence is correlated with the sense of teaching efficacy and responsibility for student learning. Whilst there has been some research into teacher confidence, there has been insufficient research into early childhood teachers’ confidence to teach RE in Catholic schools in an Australian context. Literature supports the notion that if early childhood teachers have a strong teacher confidence for a subject, they are more motivated to teach the subject and this has a positive correlation with positive student outcomes. The epistemological approach underpinning the research is constructivist in nature; therefore, it is based on understanding the constructed realities of what humans know of the world and themselves as produced by communications and systems of meaning. Three case studies follow teachers from their early career to second-year experience in Catholic schools. This study investigates support structures and aspects that contribute to teacher confidence in the teaching of RE. The main themes identified by the data that contributed to confidence or lack of confidence included training, family and religious backgrounds, teaching and learning, mentoring and support in the first year of teaching. The implications of the results for pre-service teacher training and support for graduate teachers are discussed and some suggestions are offered about the courses provided by universities and what schools and education systems can do to support early career teachers to teach RE effectively in Catholic schools.

Early career mentoring in England: a case study of professional discretion and policy disconnection

PurposeThis paper aims to consider the practices and experiences of the new school-based mentors for Early Career Teachers (ECT's), emerging from the UK Government's new early career framework (ECF) policy (DfE, 2019a). The paper uses Lipsky's (2010) framing of professionals as “street level bureaucrats” to consider the extent to which the ECT mentors, as new policy actors, exercise professional discretion (Lipsky, 2010) in negotiating and aligning the new ECF policy with existing practice.Design/methodology/approachTo research the mentor's interpretation and enactment of the new ECF policy, semi structured interviews were undertaken with an initial sample of nine mentors and four induction tutors who were also mentors. Online semi structured interviews were held, lasting around 50 min. This method was largely pragmatic as the study started during a period when schools were still cautious of face-to-face visitors in terms of COVID-19. Although the benefits for the interviewer experiencing the culture and context in which the ECT mentor was situated were lost, offering online interviews was critical in securing mentors' time.FindingsFindings suggest a disconnect between the intentions of the policy and the reality of its enactment at a local level. The ECT mentors have limited professional discretion, but some are exercising this in relation to their own professional development and the training they are providing for their ECTs. Most of the mentors are adapting the ECT's professional development journey whilst mindful of the programme requirements. The degree to which the ECT mentors used professional discretion was linked and limited largely by their own levels of confidence and experience of mentoring, and to a lesser extent the culture of their schools.Research limitations/implicationsThe ECF policy represents an important step in acknowledging the need to professionally develop mentors for the work they undertake supporting beginning teachers. However, the time and the content of the mentor training have not been given sufficient attention and remains a hugely missed opportunity. It does not appear to be recognised by the government policy makers but more significantly and concerning in this research sample it is not being recognised sufficiently by those mentoring the ECTs themselves.Practical implicationsThere is an urgent need by the UK government and school leaders to understand the link between the quality of mentor preparation and the quality of the ECTs who will be entering the profession and influencing the quality of education in future years. More time and resourcing need to be focussed on the professional development of mentors enabling them to exercise professional discretion in increasingly sophisticated ways in relation to the implementation of the ECF policy.Originality/valueThe ECF policy is the latest English government response to international concerns around the recruitment and retention of teachers. The policy mandates for a new policy actor: the ECT mentor, responsible for the support and professional development of beginning teachers. The nature of the mentor's role in relation to the policy is emerging and provides an interesting case study in the disconnect between the intentions of a policy and its initial enactment on the ground. The mentors may be viewed as street level bureaucrats exercising degrees of professional discretion as they interpret the policy in their own school context.

Examining Early Career Teachers’ Formative Practices to Inform and Support Continuous Improvement

This year-long, multiple case study followed a small group (N=6) of graduates from an initial licensure Education Preparation Program (EPP) into their classrooms to observe their first year as licensed teachers in United States public schools. The study’s purpose was twofold: 1) to explore the extent to which this group used formative assessments in their classrooms to positively impact student learning, and 2) to examine strengths and areas for improvement within our EPP based on our observations of the teacher participants’ practice and impact on their students. Multiple data sources were collected and analyzed. Based on participant interviews, survey data, and observations, findings indicate that our EPP coursework and clinical experiences contribute to beginning teachers’ effective use of formative assessments to impact student learning. However, findings support recommendations for EPP continuous improvement. This study highlights the importance of completing self-studies to determine strengths of an EPP and areas for improvement so EPPs, teachers, and K-12 students have greater success. To increase the effectiveness of teacher training, EPPs must continuously evaluate the efficacy of their educator preparation programs including evaluating their graduates’ ability to transition from pre to in-service teachers and implement effective pedagogical practices that promote student success. Keywords: formative assessment, educator preparation, continuous improvement