Four-State Survey Study

Four-State Survey Study

New Teachers’ Experiences of Hiring and Professional Culture:
A Four-State Survey Study

The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Susan Moore Johnson, Principal Investigator
Susan Kardos & Edward Liu, Co-Investigators

As they contend with the growing teacher shortage, states and districts are employing more creative and aggressive recruitment strategies. In doing so, they often overlook the major role that attrition plays in aggravating the shortage. In the end, retention may well prove to be far more important than recruitment in building a strong and qualified teaching force.

Effective approaches to retention depend on better understanding new teachers’ experiences in their schools. What, for instance, are new teachers’ first interactions with their schools like? How are they being hired, and does it matter whether they are hired by district central offices or by individual schools? After new teachers obtain positions, what sorts of professional cultures do they encounter within their schools—i.e., what blends of norms, values, and modes of professional practice do they find among their faculty colleagues? The answers to these questions are important. For if educational leaders and policymakers can understand how to design hiring processes that lead to better matches between individuals and schools, as well as how to build and nurture professional cultures that support new teachers while they are novices, they can address important aspects of the school staffing challenge.

We are currently completing a two-year, four-state study that surveyed a randomly selected group of 486 first-year and second-year teachers in both charter and non-charter schools about their experiences with hiring and professional culture. In our study, we examine:

	The ways in which new teachers are being hired;
	The extent to which the hiring process influences the fit (or lack of fit) between new teachers and their schools and teaching positions;
	Whether teachers who were hired through decentralized (school-based) hiring are more satisfied with teaching and with their schools than teachers who were hired through centralized (district-based) hiring;
	The types of professional interactions new teachers have with their colleagues;
	The extent to which new teachers have access to support from experienced colleagues;
	Whether teachers who work in schools with highly integrated professional cultures—schools in which teachers have frequent and meaningful interactions across all experience levels and that have structures to support novices’ distinctive needs—have a higher sense of efficacy and are more satisfied at their jobs than teachers who work in less integrated professional cultures.

The products of this study will include both individual articles on teacher hiring and on professional culture, as well as a larger report synthesizing findings and providing recommendations for policymakers and school administrators.

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Last modified: May 06, 2005