The teaching profession has both retention and recruitment problems. High teacher turnover, paired with teacher shortages, has and will prove costly for all schools, particularly those in high poverty areas. Research in other professions suggests that attitudes and perceptions of work matter in both performance and in retention, yet, too often, school leaders and policy makers ignore teachers’ perceptions of their working environment. This study uses ;;thriving” – experiencing a sense of both learning and vitality at work – to investigate the work perceptions of middle school teachers in the high poverty setting to understand what contributes to the positive and negative experiences teachers face. The study employed an empirically tested survey tool to measure thriving, administering the instrument to 101 teachers, working in the high poverty (Title I) setting at five middle schools, in the same district, in the southern United States. I conducted follow-up interviews with ten high and eight low scoring participants to add teachers’ descriptions of what contributed to their thriving, learning, and vitality in schools. Correlated as well to factors from research on effective schools, the study suggests that teachers are less likely to thrive because of a lack of vitality, in part because of student interactions, and those scoring low on thriving are less likely to see teaching in their future. Learning varied less than vitality across the sample, but interviews revealed that thriving corresponds to more experiential views of learning as opposed to more episodic ones. I conclude with proposing a thriving teaching model to situate this study’s findings in the broader teacher retention context by providing implications of the model and proposed next steps to guide future research.
【 预 览 】
附件列表
Files
Size
Format
View
Exploring Work Perceptions in High Poverty Schools:Middle School Teachers' Thriving, Vitality, and Learning at Work
PDF
download
878987797
028-85220240
