Early career teacher attrition: new thoughts on an intractable problem

By Andrea Gallant, P. Riley. 2014

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Early career exit from teaching has reached epidemic proportions and appears intractable. Previous attempts to find solutions are yet to make much of an inroad. The aim of the research was to discover what nine beginning teachers required to remain in the classroom, by adopting a phenomenological approach. The authors identified participants’ common experiences through semi-structured interviews and unprompted written narratives. Data were examined for trustworthiness by reference to the literature. Key words from the narratives were synonyms, or broadly synonymous with, optimism, arrested development or disillusionment. The process of leaving involved entry, characterised by optimism; early experiences, characterised by arrested development; pre-exit, characterised by disillusionment; and exit.

Subfields: Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c76dc959da3a1d28c73b74e133c08adb40ecd804

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Auli Toom
2. K. Pyhältö
3. P. Parker
4. J. Pietarinen
5. T. Soini
6. C. Craig
7. Jiesi Guo
8. Julia Waldeyer

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. P. Parker
2. Jiesi Guo
3. Theresa Dicke
4. Herbert W. Marsh
5. J. Pietarinen
6. K. Pyhältö
7. C. Craig
8. Julia Waldeyer

In Philosophy

1. C. Craig
2. Auli Toom
3. P. Riley

Citations in the corpus

• Job satisfaction of teachers and their principals in relation to climate and student achievement. (2020, background): “T hi s ar tic le is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. Teacher attrition is an important and frequently researched area (Dicke et al., 2014, 2015, 2016; Dupriez et al., 2016; Gallant & Riley, 2014).”
• International teacher attrition: multiperspective views (2017, background): “Gallant and Riley interestingly chose male beginning teachers as their convenience sample because males historically have been ‘most sought after.’ They, like Newberry and Allsop (US), also use Kelchtermans’s (2009) scholarship to frame their work, specifically his Personal Interpretive Framework.”
• Do teachers’ years of experience make a difference in the quality of teaching? (2020, unknown): “For example, the terms “ graduate, ” “ beginning, ” and “ early career ” are used interchangeably to describe teachers with any combination of experience of up to fi ve years (Gallant & Riley, 2014; Mockler, 2018; Sullivan, Johnson, & Simons, 2019).”
• Teacher wellbeing: a review of the literature (2017, background): “While there is some localised variation in attrition rates, in general the rate of loss to the profession in many countries is around 40–50% over the five years post entry (Gallant & Riley, 2014, p. 563).”
• Early career teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom: associations with turnover intentions and perceived inadequacy in teacher–student interaction (2017, background): “It has been suggested that early career teachers who leave teaching have experienced few opportunities for professional growth (Gallant & Riley, 2014).”