Attracting And Keeping The Best Teachers

This book challenges dominant thinking about early career teachers and their work. It offers an in-depth and critical analysis of policies concerning the work of early career teachers and how they are supported during this critical period, when they are highly vulnerable to leaving the profession. Moreover, the book provides examples from actual practice that illustrate how to help early career teachers make a successful transition into the profession. These practices promote early career teachers’ development and help the profession as a whole to capitalize on the new knowledge and skills that these teachers bring to their classrooms and their students. The book is divided into two main parts. Part 1 deals with the difficult to define process of retaining early career teachers, and its respective chapters consider this broad issue from an international perspective. They explore how policies and practices have an impact on what happens in schools, and what it means to be a teacher and to teach. In turn, Part 2 focuses on the need to reconsider the policies and practices that create the ‘problem’ of early career teachers, and offers alternative ways forward. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of the early career teacher retention issue, contributing to a greater understanding of how we can rethink the work of early career teachers so that they can more successfully transition into the profession.

This book demonstrates that policy, professionalism, and pedagogy are integral to the development of the best teachers that our students deserve. The empirical quantitative and qualitative studies and narratives presented in this volume demonstrate that strong analyses are needed to drive decisions on policy and practice.

This book addresses one of the most persistent issues confronting governments, educations systems and schools today: the attraction, preparation, and retention of early career teachers. It draws on the stories of sixty graduate teachers from Australia to identify the key barriers, interferences and obstacles to teacher resilience and what might be done about it. Based on these stories, five interrelated themes - policies and practices, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and relationships – provide a framework for dialogue around what kinds of conditions need to be created and sustained in order to promote early career teacher resilience. The book provides a set of resources – stories, discussion, comments, reflective questions and insights from the literature – to promote conversations among stakeholders rather than providing yet another ‘how to do’ list for improving the daily lives of early career teachers. Teaching is a complex, fragile and uncertain profession. It operates in an environment of unprecedented educational reforms designed to control, manage and manipulate pedagogical judgements. Teacher resilience must take account of both the context and circumstances of individual schools (especially those in economically disadvantaged communities) and the diversity of backgrounds and talents of early career teachers themselves. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required– cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities: teachers cannot do it alone. This book is written to generate conversations amongst early career teachers, teacher colleagues, school leaders, education administrators, academics and community leaders about the kinds of pedagogical and relational conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing.

This book offers suggestions on how to retain good teachers, from strategies for welcoming new teachers to ideas for how to make veteran teachers feel valued.

Retaining new teachers has never been easy and when the teachers are on the fast track in urban settings, turnover and retention are real problems. This book examines how schools can work to recruit, support, and somehow hold on to new teachers, many of whom have only limited formal preparation and experience in the classroom. Getting and Keeping New Teachers explores the orientation of new teachers, their lives in urban schools, and the key role of school leadership and strong collegiality, all of which combine in some cases to support and retain new teachers in important ways.

This book provides commentary on the influence of multi-layered political contexts that surround the work of teacher educators worldwide. It addresses the drawbacks of the massification, standards-based movements and marketisation of universal business that threaten authenticity, innovation and entrepreneurship within teacher education on a global scale. The chapters celebrate the richly described local stories that explore the often tacit political activity that underpins teacher educators’ work. The book highlights the commitment of both teachers and teacher educators to social justice, and human rights and critical consciousness as central to the process of teacher development. Teacher formation, teacher education policies and curriculum development in an era of globalisation, super-diversity and the positioning of Indigenous populations, and national regulation and localisation are topics that are explored in this book.

By prioritizing recruitment and retention in a new, systemic way, districts and schools can experience increased success in finding and retaining those teachers their students desperately need. This practical playbook for K12 school and district leaders is a collection of some of the most effective strategies and tactics that are working to attract, screen, hire, and retain the teachers that districts need most, including:- opportunities to learn, assess, and reflect on current practices that work and gaps to address;- concrete, proven next steps for building a year-round, multi-stakeholder recruitment system that will attract more effective teachers; - a variety of proven levers for improving support, growth, and leadership opportunities for retaining teachers; and- 50+ pages of appendices with templates, forms, and guides for components of an effective recruitment campaign.

This handbook presents a timeless, comprehensive, and up-to-date resource covering major issues in the field of teacher education research. In a global landscape where migration, inequality, climate change, political upheavals and strife continue to be broadly manifest, governments and scholars alike are increasingly considering what role education systems can play in achieving stability and managed, sustainable economic development. With growing awareness that the quality of education is very closely related to the quality of teachers and teaching, teacher education has moved into a key position in international debate and discussion. This volume brings together transnational perspectives to provide insight and evidence of current policy and practice in the field, covering issues such as teacher supply, preservice education, continuing professional learning, leadership development, professionalism and identity, comparative and policy studies, as well as gender, equity, and social justice.