Teaching in good faith: Towards a framework for defining the deep supports that grow and retain first-year teachers

Abstract

‘Good faith’ refers to the existentialist concept of living and acting in harmony with one’s innermost values. An educator who teaches in good faith will fully actualize her philosophy of teaching in the classroom, which leads to greater job fulfilment and a higher likelihood of retention in the profession. Currently, much of the extant literature refers to teachers needing greater emotional support, but this original phenomenological study uncovered the need for deep supports, defined as adaptive methods for helping educators define, develop, and enact their values and beliefs in the classroom. The study hypothesizes that the need for deep supports has never been fully explored because the language of the educational industry does not fully attend to this aspect of teaching. To that end, this study explored the relationship between school environment and the development of good-faith teaching in first-year educators with the goal of providing language and a conceptual framework to understand the ways in which first-year teachers enact their emerging identities in the classroom. Ultimately, the study links good faith teaching to teacher retention and provides indicators of school environments that provide deep supports for teaching in good faith.

Keywords:

• Teaching in good faith
• teacher attrition
• first-year teachers
• deep supports
• deep practices
• existentialism
• teacher identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Newburgh

Katherine Newburgh earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Denver. Her research interests include early-career teacher development and supports, teacher attrition, and teacher identity. She began her career in education teaching Language Arts in New York City, and has since been an educational researcher and Academic Affairs Director. She is currently a Strategy Lead with Eagle County Schools in the mountains of Colorado.