A significant number of educators depart from the profession within their initial 5 years, particularly in urban and rural schools with a notable prevalence of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This circumstance often presents school districts with the challenge of either hiring underqualified personnel or leaving instructional…

New teachers felt unprepared as they entered their first year of teaching and were leaving the teaching field at a high rate every school year. Tennessee, like many other states, had a critical shortage of secondary mathematics teachers. Secondary mathematics has been considered a high-needs subject area. New teacher induction programs were…

In this qualitative study, I address novice, alternatively licensed Career Technical Education (CTE) teachers' perceptions of professional development support in a southeastern school district in the state of Tennessee. The lack of tailored professional development opportunities created issues for CTE teachers because of the complexity of their…

The aim of this study was to explore the extent to which teachers received the education or training that prepared them to teach social studies content knowledge, social studies critical thinking skills, and their overall preparation to become highly qualified teachers. The participants in the study were active social studies teachers in Tennessee…

Most education agencies have implemented new teacher evaluation systems that promise to improve teacher performance. Post-observation performance feedback is a theoretically important driver of this promise as it should ultimately develop teacher-specific weaknesses. This is the first large-scale study to use the written feedback provided to…

The United States is seeing a widespread teacher shortage. Enrollments in TPPs have declined over the past decades, attrition rates are high, and the COVID-19 pandemic just exacerbated the issue. National and state governments, colleges and universities, and school districts have been looking to strengthen the teacher pipeline by establishing…

The United States is seeing a widespread teacher shortage. Enrollments in TPPs have declined over the past decades, attrition rates are high, and the COVID-19 pandemic just exacerbated the issue. National and state governments, colleges and universities, and school districts have been looking to strengthen the teacher pipeline by establishing…

Novice teachers improve substantially in their first years on the job, but we know remarkably little about the nature of this skill development. Using data from Tennessee, we leverage a feature of the classroom observation protocol that asks school administrators to identify an item on which the teacher should focus their improvement efforts. This…

The problem addressed in this qualitative study is the rise in teacher job dissatisfaction and low rates of retention, which has resulted in a significant increase in teacher vacancies in school districts across the United States. The purpose of this study was to describe and understand the lived experiences of early-career secondary teachers with…

Three major pathways for teacher preparation and certification exist in the United States to recruit and train effective teachers, including traditional, alternative, and teacher residency programs. There is a growing but limited body of research on teacher effectiveness of educators who complete teacher residency programs and the factors of the…

This study sought to determine whether a significant difference exists in the efficacy of teachers who received a traditional licensure versus those who received alternative licensure in their first three years of teaching. Additionally, the research aimed to determine if there was a significant difference in student growth based upon teacher…

Teachers with less than 5 years of teaching experience in low socioeconomic status schools are more likely to leave education than those who have taught in a higher socioeconomic school, often leaving schools in low socioeconomic areas struggling to fill vacancies and to keep a full teaching staff. Many students are high-risk if they attend a…

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then empirically examine how teacher shortages vary geographically and by subject using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee traditional public schools during Fall 2019. We find that teacher…

This digital ethnographic study aimed to understand how and why college students decide to be teachers while many trained teachers leave the profession every year in the United States. A purposive sampling technique enabled 30 prospective teachers in a college of education to participate in this study. The research questions that guided the study…

We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher…