Context and the Continuum: Insights and Connections Between Preparation, School Organization, and Beginning Teachers' Instruction

Introduction

How teachers' instructional practices and underlying beliefs are shaped and changed has been one of the enduring inquiries for those invested in improving our schools, from teacher educators and administrators to policymakers. The recent history of failed instructional reforms in the United States exemplifies that changing teachers' beliefs and practices is hard work.

Those who study teacher education and teacher development point to the complexity and individual-level factors that influence and shape teacher change. Many would argue that the apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975), or the instructional conceptions that new teachers bring with them after watching their teachers when they were students, is too intense an obstacle to overcome in the relatively brief preparation period (Denscombe, 1982; Holmes Group, 1986). This, coupled with the pressures of socialization experienced once new teachers start in the classroom (Goodwin, 2012; Hoy & Rees, 1977), often leads to teachers replicating the traditional forms of instruction that they grew up with, effectively “washing out” any impacts that teacher preparation might have had (Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981). Other school context factors play a role, as under-resourced schools with crowded classrooms, a lack of high-quality curriculum, and test-based accountability structures are challenging places for teachers to start their careers (Dack & Triplett, 2020; Strom et al., 2018), leading to an increased focus on induction programs and supports for early-career teachers (Ingersoll, 2012).

Concerns about teacher instructional change on a broader scale, at the school or systems level, point us towards making more ecological considerations for how such development happens (Diaz-Gibson et al., 2021; Haynes, 2014), especially as the field has shifted into a focus on school organization and coherence as the new path towards reform (Coburn et al., 2016). Schools with clear visions and the educational infrastructures (Spillane et al., 2015, 2018) to support these visions, such as aligned curriculum, assessment, and professional development opportunities, all have shown to be key components of influencing teachers’ instruction and student learning for the better. Because of the broad scope of such studies, research about organized schools tends to focus on identifying the components of coherence, outcomes for student learning, and average impacts on teachers’ instruction or beliefs.

Knowing that novice teacher induction contexts and supports are crucially important to the development of novice teachers’ instruction and that factors beyond these contexts, such as teachers’ backgrounds and experiences in preparation also influence teachers’ practice, it seems prudent to investigate the intersection of the two. Current research tends not to take such a holistic approach to understanding novice teacher induction experiences and instead tends to evaluate the impact of singular induction programs on narrow outcomes such as teacher retention or value-added scores. We know very little about teachers’ comparative experiences and development in more and less organized school contexts.

Therefore, this study and paper investigate the following: What happens when biography, teacher preparation, and school context factors collide? Are some schools organized in ways that might help or hinder the development of novice teachers? What can we learn about teacher development in this crucial phase in different school contexts?

This chapter expands on current research by examining school organizations’ impacts on novice teachers’ induction experiences and development. By following novice teachers in transition between highly organized and less organized schools, this study hopes to better understand how these contexts are experienced by beginning teachers and how their instruction is influenced. Insights gained from this work can show how school organizations might enable or inhibit the instructional development of novice teachers during their induction into the profession.