Thursday, June 19, 2008
I need help!
As others have noted, I think I am going to abandon the EOC issue as well. I guess I was holding onto the topic since I was in the heart of testing my own students and was feeling stressed / overwhelmed by the whole situation…haha. Thank goodness they are over so that I can move on. I am going to focus solely on the teacher attrition question. As Dr. Mac suggested, I want to interview new teachers and try to determine what factors are pushing them to stay or leave teaching. Although I have determined the general topic, I am still questioning where to go from here. I guess I am wondering how I would be able to interview enough teachers that are leaving the field and whether teachers would want to talk about the reasons why they were leaving? I am anticipating that this would be a quantitative study as I would want to interview teachers to get their personal opinions. I am struggling with how to incorporate this issue within my social studies content. I could narrow my research within teacher attrition to include only social studies teachers. It would be interesting to see if there were consistencies among social studies teachers and why they are staying or leaving. My question to my peers and my professors is whether the question of “What are the causes of teacher attrition for secondary social studies teachers?” is too broad or not?
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3 comments:
I think that this is a cool topic, because there is such a problem with turnover rates. I was wondering how you would interview your subjects. You would have yo interview them in the fall, but everyone would either be returning to an old job or starting a new one. It might be hard to get good reactions out of them. I would say that spring would be a great time to ask, when the question of leaving is fresh on their minds and they are asked by admin. to submit their intent to stay or leave. You could however, interview just people who left one school for another and see the similarities and differences.
Sort of complementing what Andrew said, even focusing on the attrition rate, I don't believe you'll have to work exclusively with teachers that actually are leaving. As you said, it might be hard to locate such teachers, and harder still to get a reliable answer out of them. I think you'd be better served to just find a lot of first-year teachers and interview them: ask them what the biggest difficulties were; ask them if they had moments where they thought they'd quit; ask them if they almost did. That line of questioning might be just as valid, though obviously the teachers would have stuck with it -- again which may prove more valuable in the long run of the study.
Katie, I am glad you are able to rise above the EOC!! I like your topic, and I wonder if it would be more manageable if your question were something like "What are the problems faced by beginning teachers?" You could then interview some first and second year teachers and talk about their difficulties. Then you wouldn't have to find teachers who were leaving. I don't know whether or not you would want to study only social studies teachers....
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