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Home Page > Research2 > Archives > Retaining Effective Teachers
Information For Beginning Teacher Participants
Duration of Project: 3.5 years, starting early 2006.
Conducted by: Researchers of the Teacher Learning and
Development Program of the Designs for Learning Research Cluster, Faculty of
Education at the University of Technology, Sydney: Associate Professor Sandy
Schuck, Associate Professor Peter Aubusson, Dr John Buchanan, Dr Anne Prescott.
The project is investigating the early years of a teacher’s professional
life, and focuses on reasons for teachers leaving or remaining in the profession.
The long-term aim is to improve the early career experiences of teachers and
the project outcomes will be recommendations to support retention.
The project targets graduands entering the profession who completed their
degrees in 2005. So graduands from all universities in NSW are invited to participate.
There are two main stages:
- All exiting graduands are asked to provide an email address for contact
for the duration of the project. They will be asked to complete a ‘tracking’ survey
annually so that their employment situation can be monitored for the life
of the project. This survey only takes five minutes to complete.
- Graduands will be asked to volunteer for further involvement in the project
by contributing to one or both of the following phases. The methodology for
this phase was deliberately developed to incorporate engaging and enjoyable
ways for participants to represent their thoughts and feelings, and
to interact with the researchers. These methodologies include:
- Choice Modelling. This is an award-winning methodology developed
by the Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) at UTS, designed to predict
and understand the decisions people make (in this case, decisions teachers
make about staying or leaving the profession). Volunteers will be asked
to complete two choice surveys over the life of the project. These are
anticipated to take no longer than 30 minutes each.
- Phone interviews. These will be conducted twice a year with
a small group of volunteers. Not only will teachers be engaged in the ‘different’ methods
of providing information, the phone contact will ensure a sympathetic
ear that is absent in some more conventional methodologies. Data gathering
strategies will include:
- Metaphor. We hope you will enjoy initially identifying yourselves
with a particular metaphor involving a journey, and tracing your professional
satisfaction through adapting, changing or retaining the metaphor. It
is a creative way of positioning oneself.
- Support and Challenge Zones. You will hopefully find that
the process of locating yourselves in one of the four segments
(low and high challenge and support) is engaging. It is a different,
diagrammatic and interesting way of positioning oneself according to
critical dimensions of teacher satisfaction.
- Narratives/sharing of critical incidents. We have found that
it is helpful to share experiences with a detached but sympathetic listener.
Such instances yield rich qualitative data that is rarely obtained in
surveys alone.
Participating teachers will also be afforded the opportunity to share their
thoughts and feelings about teaching at a Sharing Conference scheduled
for the second year and again towards the end of the project.
For more information, or if you wish to participate, please contact sandy.schuck@uts.edu.au
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