‘Learning Together, Shaping Tomorrow’: New Teachers Try New Ways

Abstract

Teacher induction programs provide the critical support that new teachers need as they move from university teacher education studies to the everyday realities of teaching. Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) work through a range of new and challenging experiences as they explore their sense of themselves as professionals. Their identities are being constantly constructed and reconstructed as they work through their subjective experience of being a teacher and the objective structures of the wider educational field of the classroom, school and the local community. A high percentage of NQTs leave the teaching profession within the first 5 years of beginning teaching as they grapple with and succumb to the challenges caused by a number of stressors they encounter. New teachers frequently become dissatisfied with the outcomes of their work and decide that they are unsuited to teaching and leave the profession. This article is based on a study of beginning teachers in two Australian states. The focus is on multiple ways to meet the needs of new teachers to establish their professional identity within the context of a community of learners and to value diversity and complexity in the professional community. Key issues addressed included: teacher induction and quality teaching, changing school cultures and the culture of professional learning, teacher learning and responding to changes in the wider community.