Who becomes a teacher and how it matters for their professional practices?

• In Event: The Supply Side of Teacher Labor Markets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Proposal

Various teacher-related policies and programs create mechanisms and systems to support, enhance or modify teacher behaviors. These include nationally and internationally funded efforts to improve pre-service training and generate impactful teacher professional development. This also includes various mechanisms to incentivize specific teacher behaviors that policymakers deem desirable. Extensive research has focused on how to better design these multiple approaches to support, enhance or modify teacher behaviors. However, this literature lacks a clear understanding of how teacher supply-side factors (who becomes a teacher and why they stay in the profession) may interact with these policies and programs to generate intended or unintended outcomes in terms of teacher behaviors and at the system level.

In this paper, we use Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data from Viet Nam, South Africa, and Colombia, three diverse, middle-income countries, to investigate these relationships. We use a range of teacher background variables aligned with their reasons to join the profession, stay in the profession, and their own background (age, gender, experience, etc.) to account for some of the teacher supply side factors. We then investigate how these teacher (supply side) factors relate to their performance and outcomes on various teacher professional development and classroom management practices. We conduct this investigation by taking into account the vastly different schools these teachers find themselves in. Thus, we try to isolate the relationship between teacher supply-side factors and their behaviors and outcomes. While this research has several limitations stemming from our use of secondary data and our inability to view the full life-cycle of a teacher, from deciding to join the profession and beyond, it offers some initial insights into the relationship between who becomes a teacher and if and how it matters for the success and failure of various teacher-related policies and interventions.

Authors

• Amita Chudgar, Michigan State University

• Aliya Bizhanova, Michigan State University

• Su Yon Choi, Michigan State University