AJE May 2021 Issue | Are New Teachers Still “On Their Own”? by Matthew Shirrell

The full-length American Journal of Education article “On Their Own? The Work-Related Social Interactions and Turnover of New Teachers” by Matthew Shirrell can be accessed here.

Close your eyes and remember your first day at a new job. On your first day, and in the days and weeks that followed, how did you learn about the expectations of your new position, and how did you gain access to the materials, information, and other resources you needed to do your job? Chances are there was no manual that taught you much of this important information; instead, you likely learned about your work from your more experienced colleagues.

If you relied on your colleagues in those early days, you were not alone. Research shows that new employees’ relationships with their colleagues allow new employees to access the information and other resources that help them learn about, adjust to, and succeed in their new jobs. Accessing these resources is crucial, as new employees’ interactions with their colleagues shape not only their adjustment to their new jobs, but also their organizational commitment, job satisfaction, performance, and long-term retention in their positions.

Are interactions with colleagues as important for new teachers as they are for new employees in other fields? On one hand, it seems that interactions with colleagues would be just as important for new teachers as for new employees in other fields. New teachers, after all, must learn about and adjust to their new positions, so accessing the information and other resources necessary to accomplish these tasks might be as important for new teachers as for other new employees. On the other hand, the history and structure of teaching are different than those of other occupations, and the organizations where teachers work—schools—differ in important ways from other workplaces. As Dan Lortie described in his classic Schoolteacher, the work of teaching in U.S. public schools has evolved to take place largely behind closed doors; teachers generally work alone in “egg crate” classrooms, and there is little differentiation in responsibilities between new and experienced teachers. One reason for this isolation and lack of differentiation is that teaching has developed little of what Lortie called a “shared technical culture,” or an agreed-upon set of practices and approaches to the work of teaching. Without such a shared body of agreed-upon knowledge, each new teacher learns how to teach essentially alone, with relatively little guidance from the outside. Prior research has indeed found that new teachers do not interact extensively with their colleagues, and are instead left, as Kardos and Johnson (2007) aptly put it, “on their own and presumed expert” by their peers.   

Yet with an increased focus on new teacher mentoring, and on teacher collaboration more generally, are new teachers still “on their own” as they begin their first jobs? In my paper just published in AJE, I set out to answer this question. I was particularly interested in understanding new teachers’ places in their schools’ networks of advice interactions, under the assumption that information and other resources are embedded not just in individuals but in the relations among them, and that understanding these relations is key to understanding how new teachers access and leverage these resources. I aimed to answer three specific questions: First, to what degree do new teachers interact with their colleagues, and with whom do they interact? Second, how, if at all, do new teachers’ interactions with their colleagues change over their first years in teaching? And finally, what are the relationships, if any, between new teachers’ social interactions and their exits from their schools or teaching?

To answer these questions, I used four years of data on the social networks of 14 elementary schools in one suburban school district in the Midwest U.S. “Social networks” here do not refer to Facebook or Twitter, but to the networks of social interactions about teaching that take place in school buildings. The data on these networks were collected using surveys that asked school staff (both teachers and administrators) to name the colleagues they had sought out during that school year for advice and information about teaching various subjects. With high response rates enabled by a close collaboration with the schools (generally over 80%), I developed a picture of each school’s network of advice and information relationships and determined where new teachers were located in those networks. An example of the network of one school is shown below; this network is of advice and information interactions about English/language arts teaching. Each dot in the figure represents a school staff member, with the new teachers depicted in white. An arrow between two dots indicates that one staff member reported seeking out the other for advice or information about teaching.

Since the same network data was collected over four consecutive years, I was also able to follow new teachers and see how their connections to their colleagues changed, if at all, over time. I also used state-level data to see which teachers stayed in teaching in the state and who left, and examined whether new teachers’ connections to their colleagues predicted leaving their schools, districts, or teaching in later years.

There were three central findings. First, I found that new teachers are relatively peripheral to their schools’ advice and information networks, largely due to the fact that they are sought out by fewer of their colleagues for advice, compared to experienced teachers. This can be seen in the figure by the relative lack of arrows pointing to the white dots, compared to the gray dots. However, I found that this difference largely disappears after new teachers’ first year on the job. Starting in their second year, new teachers are sought out for advice by similar numbers of colleagues as their more experienced peers.

Second, new teachers’ advice-seeking changes very little across their early careers. The number of colleagues that new teachers seek out, the characteristics of the colleagues they seek advice from, and the frequency of their interactions with their colleagues all do not differ significantly between teachers with one to five years of experience.

Finally, in terms of the associations between network connectedness and leaving their schools, districts, or teaching, I found that new teachers who were more connected to their schools’ networks were less likely to leave their schools, districts, or teaching the following year. I found the same relationship for experienced teachers, as well, suggesting that this association is not unique to new teachers. 

My study suggests that, despite a push to encourage collaboration and new teacher mentoring, new teachers in some settings may continue to be “on their own” as they begin their first jobs.  Moreover, the findings point to a lack of a strong socialization process for new teachers, much as Lortie described. My results show that after their first year in the classroom, new teachers are indistinguishable from more experienced teachers in the degree to which they are sought out for advice by their colleagues, and do not differ in the extent to which they seek advice from others. There is no extended period during which new teachers slowly join the advice networks of their schools. Lortie wrote that in teaching, “training (and even subsequent experience) is not a dramatic watershed separating the perceptions of naïve laymen from later judgments by knowing professionals” (1975, p. 66). My findings suggest that, in the district I studied, this likely remains the case.

One implication of these findings is that schools and school districts should consider devoting specific attention—and resources—to ensuring that new teachers not only have individual mentors, but are also connected to their schools’ advice and information networks more broadly. Developing supports that encourage new teachers to interact with, and seek advice from, a broad range of colleagues in their schools could be an important step toward fostering broader interactions between new teachers and their colleagues. In order to accomplish this, however, schools may need to grant a more protected status to new teachers and to provide supports such as time, reduced responsibilities, and other resources that enable novices to engage in productive interactions about their work with a variety of colleagues.

Collegial interactions are important contributors to teacher effectiveness, learning, and improvement, and research suggests that these interactions are key to the socialization of new teachers. The findings of my study, however, suggest that efforts to encourage teacher collaboration have not done away with the “on their own and presumed expert” approach to new teacher socialization. Although many schools and school systems have increased their focus on teacher collaboration and collective learning, there remains room for improvement in the degree to which new teachers interact with their colleagues across this crucial early period and gain access to the resources that are key to their future success. Better understanding new teachers’ social interactions—and the learning and improvement that can result from these interactions—has the potential to improve new teachers’ access to important resources that can help them succeed.

I hope you will read the full article in AJE, and I encourage you to comment below or contact me (mshirrell@gwu.edu) with your questions, suggestions, and thoughts.

English/Language Arts Advice and Information Network in One Elementary School