It’s the little things: exploring the importance of commonplace events for early‐career teachers’ motivation

By Karl Kitching, M. Morgan, Michael O'Leary. 2009

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper seeks to provide a rationale for further researching the everyday events that keep teachers motivated or that discourage them. We put forward the idea that routine Affect Triggering Incidents (ATIs) are an important area for researchers to investigate in terms of how they impact teacher motivation and resilience. Two groups of participants in separate consecutive studies kept weekly diaries of incidents that made them feel good or bad about themselves in their work as teachers (Study 1) and added weekly inventories of their commitment to teaching as well as measures of self‐efficacy and self‐esteem (Study 2). An analysis of the ATIs in these diaries revealed that student engagement and student achievement are major factors in incidents triggering regular positive feelings while students’ behaviour and perceived difficulties around home influences are major factors in regular dissatisfaction. These everyday ATIs are important in the sense that they correlate significantly with measures of commitment to teaching, especially in the case of positive ATIs.

Subfields: Education, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58fa246b14a58a00a54cf304a1ee7206ed223425

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Citations in the corpus

Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience (2011, result): “found that positive events in teachers’ lives ‘‘had a much stronger lifting of teachers’ self-efficacy than the lowering effect of negative events’’ (Kitching et al., 2009, p. 54). Morgan, Ludlow, Kitching, O’Leary, and Clarke (2010), in their study of 700 beginning primary school teachers in Irelan”
Problematising the Role of Personal and Professional Relationships in Early Career Teacher Resilience (2014, result): “This supports similar findings from other studies that have found that student engagement, achievement and success can enhance teacher resilience (Kitching et al., 2009; Swars et al. 2009).”
Evaluating the impact of teacher professional development: an evidence-based framework (2014, background): “…in this way and therefore teacher efficacy was transferred to the Personal level because it is connected with teachers’ sense of how effectively they can teach and a sense of their power to effect change, with correlations between affect and efficacy (Kitching et al. 2009, Morgan et al. 2009).”
Why do some beginning teachers leave the school, and others stay? Understanding teacher resilience through psychological lenses (2012, unknown): “Brunetti, 2006 ; Kitching, Morgan, & O’Leary, 2009 ), teacher burnout and stress (e.”
What makes teachers tick? Sustaining events in new teachers’ lives (2010, background): “…I r e l a n d G a l w a y ] A t : 0 9 : 5 7 4 S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 9 fluctuations in feelings from positive to negative and vice versa that occur within a short period, as in the extracts from the diary of SP above, describing the feelings of a teacher in a typical week (Kitching et al., 2009).”
Does basic need satisfaction mediate the link between stress exposure and well-being? A diary study among beginning teachers (2017, background): “…few existing diary studies show that the typical stressors and resources, such as colleague support, student motivation, and student behavior, also function as uplifts and hassles on the day-today level (Bakker & Bal, 2010; Kitching et al., 2009; Simbula, 2010; Tadi c, Bakker, & Oerlemans, 2013).”