What Motivates Teachers to Enter the Profession?

This commentary was originally published by EdSurge. (Photo iStock)

What if why you choose to become a teacher determines how successful you will be in the role?

Society has always been fascinated to learn about the motivations of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians and how they came to their profession. We think about their career trajectory and consider its relevance to ourselves or people we know. What if, similarly, we learned about the motivations of aspiring K-12 teachers, and used that to predict how effective they will be and how long they will stay in the classroom?

Persistent concerns reiterate teacher shortages throughout the nation. Recent evidence has also pointed to declining interest in becoming a teacher, aligned with the decreased professionalization, prestige and pay of the sector. Yet noble individuals press forward and choose to educate our children anyway. Why, in spite of the headwinds, do they become teachers?

As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we’re fascinated by this question. We figured that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand teacher pipelines and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our nation’s teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.

Read the full story, including the study results, at EdSurge.