ERIC Number: EJ1162497
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Dec
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0141-1926
EISSN: N/A
Why Do Long-Serving Teachers Stay in the Teaching Profession? Analysing the Motivations of Teachers with 10 or More Years' Experience in England
Chiong, Charleen; Menzies, Loic; Parameshwaran, Meenakshi
British Educational Research Journal, v43 n6 p1083-1110 Dec 2017
This paper examines the reasons why long-serving teachers remain in the teaching profession. Interest in teacher retention has grown in recent years, both in the UK and internationally, due to concerns over teacher shortage. However, most research on retention has focused on why teachers leave; this paper aims to fill the gap in our understanding of the positive reasons why long-serving teachers stay in the profession, and how these reasons change over time. We define "long-serving teachers" as teachers who have taught for 10 years and more. We draw on a subset of data from an existing, broader study (Menzies et al., 2015) on why teachers enter and stay in the profession. In this paper, we draw on questionnaire findings from over 900 teachers with 0 to over 30 years' teaching experience, and interviews with 14 long-serving teachers, to understand why long-serving teachers enter and, more importantly for our purposes, stay in teaching. We find that teachers' motivational patterns are highly complex and influenced by school-level and policy contexts. Nonetheless, two prominent retention factors are identified: teachers' perceived professional mastery and altruistic reasons. Perceived professional mastery is particularly important due to its mutually reinforcing analytic relationships with other reasons. We find that teachers' identification with intrinsic, altruistic and perceived professional mastery reasons become stronger with years of experience, but in some cases, paradoxically, so does their identification with extrinsic reasons. From our evidence, we suggest policy implications for enhancing the retention of long-serving teachers.
Descriptors: Teacher Persistence, Teacher Motivation, Experienced Teachers, Teaching (Occupation), Foreign Countries, Teacher Shortage, Teaching Experience, Questionnaires, Interviews, Altruism, Teacher Attitudes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom (England)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A