Cultivating Early Career Teachers’ Purpose: A Mechanism to Sustain Early Career Teachers’ Commitment to the Profession
The attrition rate of early career teachers is high. In fact, the government spends $2 billion annually to replace teachers in the first five years of their tenure (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2005). The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to test the relationship between purpose, psychological well-being, and affective commitment to the profession, and 2) to design and examine the impact of a purpose-centered intervention in a sample of early career teachers in their first or second year of teaching, in the northeast. Study 1 examined the relationship between early career teachers’ purpose, psychological well-being, and commitment to the profession through a cross-sectional survey (N = 78) and regression-based analyses of a full mediation model. I hypothesized that early career teachers’ sense of purpose would contribute to their affective commitment to the profession through their feelings of psychological well-being. Results of Study 1 suggested that early career teachers’ purpose was a strong predictor of their psychological well-being and affective commitment to the profession. Building on Study 1, in Study 2 I developed, piloted, and tested a one-hour purpose-centered intervention (called Grounding in Purpose) using two t-tests (independent and dependent samples): 1) comparison of the waiting control group (n = 43) with the intervention group (n = 67) and 2) comparison of pretest and posttest scores of some participants in the intervention group (n = 20). Research findings for Study 2 indicate that a purpose-centered intervention may positively influence early career teachers’ purpose. Theoretically, the findings establish purpose as a key contributor to affective commitment in ECTs. Practically, the results offer educational leaders and professionals who support early career teachers with tangible recommendations to foster early career teachers’ purpose.
affective commitment, attrition, early career teacher, purpose, retention, well-being, Education, Organizational Behavior and Theory, Psychology
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