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conceptualizations that primarily focus on teaching. Patterns in self-described successes indicate
that across career phases, teachers develop broader and more varied conceptualizations of
success, and these successes are described in more complex ways.
Struggles across Career Phase
Complexity
.
Despite career phase, teachers were similarly skillful in reflecting on their
struggles. Approximately 33-40% of teachers described their struggles in complex ways, with
beginning teachers most frequently doing so (see Table 3).
Beginning teachers complexly described struggles that were often related to school, but
not necessarily their classrooms. Some beginning teachers noted the challenges of policy, high-
stakes testing, or collaboration with colleagues. Others noted challenges with students and lack
of administrative support. While beginning teachers’ challenges varied, veteran teachers’
complex responses described how students’ outside-of-school issues affect their teaching and the
impact of their instruction on student learning outcomes. One veteran teacher noted:
The biggest struggle has been finding ways to reach reluctant readers who have little
support outside of school. Instilling a sense that education has value and that it can make
a difference in their lives is so important and often times hard to demonstrate in a real life
manner.
Content.
Professional, student,
and
workplace
-themed struggles were the most
frequently noted across career phases (see Table 3). For beginning teachers,
professional
-related
themes dominated their struggles. This was crystalized in the responses of some beginning
teachers who described the task complexity inherent in the job, such as seemingly unrealistic
performance expectations:
One great struggle is planning instruction and gathering high quality materials for each
lesson (at each grade level) to include all the required objectives (learning objectives, oral
language objectives, individual student objectives), strategies reflective of best practice,
on-going assessment and data gathering, and writing it up in formal lesson plan format. I
love the kids, and want them to have the best, but I simply can't keep up.
Mid-career teachers’ descriptions of struggles were spread evenly between
professional,
student,
and
workplace-
related themes. Veteran teachers, however, described
student
themes most
frequently at the center of their struggles. The following self-described struggle of a veteran
teacher highlights the difficult task of educating students well despite competing foci:
I struggle with the outside stressors students are living with daily, and how it impacts
their ability to learn. Sometimes they just don't care about school because of the
overwhelming issues in their lives. A teacher can care, and hope to inspire a student to
care, but a teacher can't MAKE a student care about learning.
Professional sub-themes of
classroom management
and
teaching assignment
were described as
struggles across all career phases. However,
instruction
—the dominant
professional
sub-theme
in beginning teachers’ struggles was less frequently noted in mid-career teachers’ responses and
was absent in veterans’ responses. In teachers’ student-themed struggles and across career
phase, teachers shifted away from behavior-related struggles.