Novice teachers and how they cope

Abstract

Teachers often describe their first teaching job following graduation as a shocking experience. This description raises several questions: Do novice teachers actually have a lower level of coping than experienced teachers? Are there factors in the work environment that make coping difficult for all teachers at a school? This paper compares the ability of novice and experienced teachers to cope with their work, and how this ability is affected by the level of collegial and superior support and collaboration offered. Although we find few differences between novice and experienced teachers’ coping level, these two groups of teachers do differ in terms of the levels of collegial and superior support and collaboration. In addition to receiving a lower level of professional support from their superiors, novice teachers generally lack ways to articulate their own needs to colleagues. The ability of novice teachers to cope with their work should be considered a collective responsibility in schools rather than the fate of the individual teacher. This paper is based on observations, interviews and survey data from Norwegian schools.

Keywords:

• practice shock
• novice teachers
• professional development
• coping

Notes

1. ‘Information relating to racial or ethnic origin, political, philosophical or religious beliefs, that a person has been suspected, charged or convicted of a crime, health, sex life, and union membership’ Retrieved January 9, 2013, from http://www.nsd.uib.no/personvern/en/about/faq.html?id=10.

2. https://secc.rti.org/publications.cfm (Retrieved May 4, 2011, from the National Institutes of Health Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development Web site).

3. Missing information on single items in the survey was estimated with the expectation-maximisation (EM) imputation, and used for the CFA (Little & Rubin, 1987; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001) so as to obtain modification indices from Amos (i.e. Lagrange multiplier test). Little’s missing completely at random (MCAR) test supported the assumption that the missing information was completely at random (i.e. no systematic patterns were found in the missing responses). The empirical analyses were performed on the material without estimation, and the results with and without estimation were compared afterwards. No estimates changed from a significant result (p < 0.05) when the data without estimation were used (when the number of respondents decreased), and any changes in effects were at the third decimal place (1/100).

4. Retrieved June 2, 2011, from http://saf.uis.no/forskning/laeringsmiljoe/

5. However, when we fit the model to a subsample of 319 (15%) randomly selected teachers from the total sample (not reported here), deliberation had a significant effect on both self-efficacy and teacher certainty. This finding might imply a curvilinear relationship, in which the effect of deliberation is less important when one is beginning a teaching career and when one becomes more experienced. However, this finding should be investigated further.