Pre-service teachers’ motivations to enter the profession

ABSTRACT

In this large-scale qualitative study, we use an emergent design to explore pre-service teachers’ (PST) motivations to enter the profession. We open-code 2,798 PSTs responses to the directive, ‘Explain why you decided to become a teacher’, given over the course of a six-year period from one large Texas teacher preparation programme. Using constant comparative analysis, we identified three categories of motivation into the teaching profession: altruism, intrinsic motivation, and socialization influences. Each of these explain why PSTs were motivated—to, by, and from—entering the profession, respectively. However, descriptions of each category differed from findings in previous research, as our study addresses methodological, contextual, and conceptual gaps that have persisted throughout this field. Findings offer implications for increasing the teacher pipeline through targeted recruitment and increased informal teaching experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher motivations
• pre-service teachers
• qualitative research
• teacher beliefs

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the support of Jenna Davis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. PSTs are almost exclusively placed in their preferred districts, if the district is willing to accept clinical teachers during that semester. The preparation programme has the option to contact and place PSTs in local campuses rather than go through the district, in which, the open-ended questions then assist the programme in identifying a specific mentor teacher match.

2. The required nature of the survey and the importance of clinical teaching placement for PSTs yielded this response rate.

3. There was no specific instruction about the length of responses. We attribute these lengthy responses in part to their interest in wanting to share their motivations in detail alongside the requirement to complete the survey.

4. Two codes of deficit thinking and professional skills, both which were prevalent in the subset data, were infrequent throughout the entirety of the data and therefore dropped.

5. For ease, we only incorporate the participant number.

6. Our initial analysis exploring deficit thinking as a code was inconclusive and, as mentioned above, infrequent to warrant becoming a final code.