And if because Will your decision to become a teacher determine how successful you will be in the job?
Society has always been fascinated by the motivations of famous athletes, artists, and politicians and how they got into their profession. We think about their career paths and consider their relevance to us or to people we know. What if, in a similar way, we knew the motivations of aspiring primary and secondary teachers and used that to predict how effective they would be and how long they would stay in the classroom?
Lingering concerns are reiterated nationwide teacher shortageRecent evidence has also pointed out that declining interest Becoming a teacher, aligned with the decline Professionalization, prestige and remuneration of the sector. Yet there are noble people who go ahead and choose to educate our children anyway. Why, despite the headwinds, do they become teachers?
As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we are fascinated by this question. We thought that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand the sources of teacher labor and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our country's teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.
Between 2012 and 2018, nearly 2,800 preservice teachers from one of the largest teacher preparation programs in Texas responded to an essay question: “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We used a natural language processing algorithm to review their responses.
HistoricallyPeople went into teaching for relatively simple reasons: they wanted a stable career, they enjoyed the summers off, or they had family members who were teachers. However, in the essay responses, we found that these motivations were not the most common or related to teacher outcomes, but others were.
Study of the motivations of future teachers
Previously, researchers have focused primarily on the motivations of practicing teachers. Rather than learning from someone who is already in the profession, we wanted to learn from those who have already done so. still to enter the profession. This helps us better understand how to get someone interested in teaching and then help with recruitment.
Using machine learning to process thousands of open-ended essay responses, we identified 10 general reasons why prospective teachers want to become teachers.
The two most frequent factors were altruism (the desire to do good selflessly) and intrinsic motivation (the enjoyment of teaching, helping, or interacting with students or children). Other interesting, but less frequently cited, motivations include the impact of previous teachers, love of a content area, and a family connection to teaching.
Interestingly, motivations differed across prospective teachers' characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, gender, family income, and certification.
For example, people seeking their elementary certification were more likely to enjoy working with children, while prospective middle and high school teachers were interested in teaching a particular content area. Relatedly, men were less likely than women to say they had “always wanted to teach.” This suggests that background characteristics may determine motivations for becoming a teacher.
Furthermore, and more importantly, we found that some teacher motivations were related to better teaching outcomes. While altruism was the most common response, it was not the one most strongly correlated with effectiveness.
Specifically, future teachers who shared that they were intrinsically motivated to teach and I had experienced some adversity within the schools. Students who had these two motivating factors were found to be more effective educators and were less likely to leave the classroom prematurely. Individuals who had these two motivating factors had a significant, positive correlation with their clinical observation scores of teaching and were less likely to drop out of the K-12 public school system within the first few years of entry.
Although these effects were modest, the fact that students' own written reports of teacher motivation had any relevance to these outcomes is noteworthy. Motivations are no longer just interesting, they can have consequences.
From motivations to marketing
By better understanding teachers’ motivations, we can learn more about who might be successful in the profession. More precisely, we want to find individuals who are intrinsically motivated to teach or who have overcome adversity in educational settings.
These future teachers might be like the following study participant, who expressed how adversity and the impact of previous teachers motivated him to become a teacher:
“The statistics are stacked against someone with my background. I lived in a poor neighborhood and had a hard time learning English as a second language, and I am the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents who didn’t even finish elementary school… I was fortunate to have many teachers who became my role models… I want to give back to others what my teachers did for me.”
How can we incorporate these types of people into the classroom?
First, states should consider long-term solutions to teacher shortages, including finding and encouraging motivated individuals to participate in teacher preparation programs. Policymakers could invest in early learning opportunities, such as mentoring programs or summer programs that are explicitly designed to encourage individuals to consider careers in education and teaching (consider Innovative collaboration as an example).
Second, teacher preparation programs should prioritize strategic marketing, particularly in places where intrinsic motivation to teach emerges most naturally (think high schools, college campuses, and daycare centers).
Third, school districts could consider teachers’ motivations as part of their hiring process. All else being equal, it may be worthwhile to know candidates’ interest in teaching, as our research indicates that some motivations lead to more effective and longer-tenured teachers than others.
Through these recommendations, classrooms across the country can begin to use teacher motivations to improve student learning.
