Lessons from science teacher recruitment, preparation, and induction

Doug Larkin, a science teacher educator and researcher from Montclair State University, New Jersey, USA, will discuss his research at the intersection of science education, teacher education, and education for a multicultural and democratic society. This talk will provide both a view of the state of science education in the United States from the perspective of science teachers, as well as a report on an empirical study.

For many years, categorical differences in student achievement (e.g. by race, class, gender, etc.) were explained by deficit theories, but recently more attention has been paid to issues of pedagogy and curriculum in schools. In particular, decades of research on how students learn may be sharply contrasted with ineffective teaching methods that continue to be used in schools.

In the United States, this difference has often been most apparent in science classrooms, where reforms have been ongoing for decades to improve the teaching and learning of science, most recently with the publication of the Next Generation Science Standards in 2013. However, the impacts of such reforms have been unevenly distributed, as students from marginalized racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds continue to achieve at lower rates than their counterparts from dominant groups. 

This talk will first tell the story of the path to studying science teaching in diverse classrooms, and how this led to asking questions about science teacher retention. Research has shown that using certain core practices in science teaching, such as the elicitation of students’ ideas about scientific phenomena and building conceptual models for student sense-making is very effective for science learning —especially when compared to lectures that just deliver information to students. However, this kind of teaching is quite different from didactic approaches, and may require a great deal of effort from some teachers. If teachers have not experienced this type of teaching as learners themselves, it may be even more difficult. Yet, science teachers who engage in this type of reformed science teaching work are both more effective by many measures. As will be discussed, the key idea is to treat student ideas as the raw material of teacher’s work.

The turn to researching science teacher retention was driven by the fact that many well-prepared and effective science teachers ultimately do not remain in teaching. There are always many reasons why people leave a teaching job, so my research team began looking at the reasons why teachers who stayed did so. Historically, the notion of “job satisfaction” was seen to drive attrition and retention in many fields of labor, including teaching, but this explanation has not held up to empirical investigation. 

Our team conducted a six-year study of school districts in the United States, looking closely at school districts that had an exemplary rate of novice science teacher retention. We identified these districts in four U.S. states, and traveled to them to learn what administrators and teachers might be doing in these districts that others could replicate and learn from.

Our team found ten factors that were common among these schools, and all will be discussed at the talk, but the most important reason that science teachers stayed was the supportive relationships that they had with colleagues. Salary, professional autonomy, and returning to one’s home area were important too. For teachers of color, we found that having a supportive environment where racism and discrimination was not tolerated was extremely important. 

Efforts to provide one-on-one mentoring for new teachers were valued, but new teachers reported that informal mentoring relationships were more important. Our research team began to summarize this finding with the phrase, “the department is the mentor.” 

Surprisingly, very few of our findings were specific to science teachers alone. Adequate compensation, access to resources, opportunities for professional growth, and teacher autonomy were all key features of the high-retention districts we studied. Administrators and policymakers concerned with reducing teacher attrition are encouraged to attend to each of these areas.