Teacher Preparation and Its Impact on Teacher Careers

• In Event: 66.046 - Inspiring Teaching: Context-Specific Teacher Education for the 21st Century

Abstract

Teacher quality plays a key role in student learning outcomes. Yet, data suggest that elite college graduates who enter teaching (from programs like UTEP, ACE, and DeLeT) are less likely to stay in schools serving low-income and minority students compared to other teachers (Boyd et al., 2005). Thus, many educators and policy makers agree that in order to equalize the playing field, recruitment, preparation, and retention of high quality teachers should become a high priority.
This paper focuses on how UTEP, DeLeT, and ACE shape beginning teachers’ passion, commitments, and career and leadership aspirations. In particular it examines how teachers from the three programs rely on their preparation to negotiate and respond to challenging working conditions, including unruly students, demanding schedules and parents, low compensation, and the opportunity to make a difference. Our inquiry builds on Lortie (1975) and Huberman (1993) works on the life cycle of teachers as well as more recent studies on teacher retention by Boyd and colleagues (2009), Ingersoll (2001) and Quartz and colleagues (2003; 2008). We explore how beginning teachers from ACE, UTEP, and DeLeT develop a concept of (good) teaching (before, during and after their teacher preparation) that is informed by notions from their preparation and the realities in their schools. We contrast and explain the high level of commitment to teaching and leadership demonstrated by these teachers compared with the kinds of career commitments reported by public school teachers in previous surveys.
We employed a comparative, longitudinal case-based approach which guided our two semi-structured interviews with 30 teachers from UTEP, ACE, and DeLeT during their second and fourth years in teaching.
This study illustrates the considerable impact that both programs and schools have on the lives and career commitments of teachers. We show that on average teachers from the three programs stayed longer in teaching because they developed significant commitments to the specific student populations and schools that their program served and because they were equipped with the pedagogical tools that allow them to become effective teachers. This theme is particularly timely in light of changing career expectations on the part of new teachers, compared with those of the retiring generation of teachers (Johnson et al, 2004).

Author

• Eran Tamir, Tel Aviv University