Why New Teachers Quit (and How to Avoid Abandoning the Field)

Hey, Teachers!

The K-12 system has never been a breeze. Storms surround the most valiant and effective of teachers and threaten to wipe out teachers new to the field, especially when storms get too rough.  It's always been this way. I remember a teacher friend at the start of my career who left to be a lawyer two years into the high school position because she couldn't handle the students, felt devalued, and wanted more pay. That was a long time ago in the 1990s...

But not much has changed. In fact, the challenges we had then have intensified, making it harder for schools to hold onto new teachers who came in with excitement and enthusiasm but who find themselves unable to continue a few years down the road, much less make this a lifelong career.

👉🏼Why do new teachers leave? 

👉🏼 What can we do about it?

New teachers are both strong and fragile. New teachers enter this profession with hopes and dreams for themselves and their students. Something about "teaching" ignited them. Something about helping students become better human beings felt empowering and fulfilling. Something about the subject or grade level was exhilarating. 

Until it wasn't.

Until the system became too difficult to transcend internally or externally, and the reward was no longer worth the sacrifice.

New teachers (and teachers in general) leave K-12 education for many reasons, but mindset and motivation are at the top. When we no longer believe in ourselves or what's possible, and we no longer value the work we're doing because it's too hard or we're trampled at every corner, why stay?

New teachers who decide to quit might face:

1. A negative teacher professional identity

2. Low self-efficacy (individual, collective, or both)

✅ Negative teacher professional identity

Each of us has a teacher professional identity, in other words, a teacher self-image to grapple with and grow each year on this journey. We each begin a teaching career with a personal teaching philosophy, and refine that definition of good teaching and classroom success over the years. We add new tools and strategies for coping, resilience, and bringing about positive outcomes with students, colleagues, parents/guardians, and administration.

If teacher professional identity is low, broken, destroyed, or grayed by negative self-talk, criticism, lack of support from colleagues, a grade level or department chair, a controlling administrator, or students who throw darts and make teaching nearly impossible in the eyes of the practitioner, the early stages of professional identity development as a teacher are undoubtedly hampered and possibly, like buds on a vine, clipped with no chance of regrowth. 

And if teachers don't have the right tools for taking that negativity and choosing what to allow in and what to discard, and changing what needs to change so they can better meet job demands, the result is failure, and not "failing forward" as we often say in constructive creative and innovative trial-and-error, rather, failure that feels like an end result, a conclusion with no escape and no possibility of rectification. 

✅ Low teacher self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is a motivational theory of learning that underscores our feelings of self-confidence related to ability individually and among colleagues. We must cultivate and strengthen self-efficacy so that we can stay highly motivated, positive, and productive which in turn, affects our students' motivation, positivity, and productivity as learners.

If teacher self-efficacy is low, this might mean poorer performance in instructional delivery and assessment, mistakes in communication with colleagues, trusting the wrong people, sharing too much, lacking support, losing control, and believing we "can't" accomplish our basic job duties or have allowed fear to take over at times when we should rise more objectively to the occasion to push through.

Self-efficacy involves what we assume about our situation, new procedural knowledge, and ourselves in those processes. Our beliefs and values drive everything we do on the job. If a new teacher has low self-efficacy, beliefs and values about capability are likely low, and the practitioner is struggling to "keep up" with everything a school year presents, especially in areas that are challenging.

✅ How to avoid abandoning the field

Following are three areas that can help new teachers strengthen teacher self-image and self-efficacy.

1. Support: Teacher support means creating a school culture that fosters teacher sharing, voice, and vote. New teachers who feel heard and appreciated for their knowledge, talents, and expertise will likely thrive more in the school environment as newcomers. This includes how veteran or seasoned teachers approach new teacher mindsets and generational disconnect or differences in approach.

2. Investment in human capital: Programs for new teachers that invest in who those teachers are, what they need and want, and how to best deliver on those values will likely create environments where new teachers feel understood and that they belong even in the very first year. Administrators who magnify new teacher roles, listen to new teacher suggestions, and include new teachers in broad-based decision-making are investing in those new hires as people whose ideas and contributions are worthwhile.

3. Time: Time is the one thing we value most and have the least. New teachers who can begin to master the "time question" early on in this career have a better chance of feeling efficacious when new tasks, demands, responsibilities, and duties are thrown at them (or that they choose as volunteers). Training in time management is a "must-have" both for effective lesson planning and classroom instruction, and also to create foundations for self-preservation so a new teacher isn't arriving early, staying late, and working weekends as a regular routine. Trusted mentors and seasoned colleagues are valuable resources for new teachers to continue learning how to master the use of time and stay within contract hours.

New teachers inevitably face hardships that exist just because they are new to the position.  But what matters most in these first few years is planning on the part of the individual teacher and the support circles in place to guide that individual teacher toward a strong teacher self-image and high self-efficacy.

A school is a community. Even if the community is somewhat broken as an organization, new teachers can still ascertain foundational ways of thinking that can prevent the sense that quitting is the only option. Sometimes, there are dealbreakers or we learn that we're better suited for another calling in life.

But if you really want to teach, you care what happens to your students, and have the true intrinsic desire to create a positively dynamic learning space, know that this is doable no matter how hard your circumstances (or other personalities) may seem in these early years.

Years do get better.

And with every year comes greater wisdom into the "why" behind being a teacher that only those of us who've been in long enough can truly appreciate as the reasons why we stayed. Those reasons aren't hinged on a paycheck. They have to do with the beauty of hope, opportunity, and possibility in the art of teaching. 🌱