To stay or leave? Efficacy development in urban first-year teachers and its link to their persistence

With the national call for a highly qualified teacher in every classroom (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) and a self-inflicted teacher retention national crisis affecting our most vulnerable students in the backdrop (NCTAF, 1996, 2003), this qualitative inquiry seeks to contribute to understanding teacher turnover in urban schools. With self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) as a theoretical guide, the questions that under-gird this study are: (1) How do new urban high school teachers experience their first year of teaching? (2) How do those experiences contribute to their sense of efficacy? (3) How is that sense of efficacy linked to their decision about whether to remain teaching at their school?; The site for this inquiry is a comprehensive public high school in a northeastern urban district. Eight first-year teachers, four science and four technical arts, participated in this study during the 2005-2006 school year. Five semi-structured, open-ended interviews with each participant and a focus group with all participants were conducted. Three written reflections on his or her concerns as a novice teacher were requested from each participant.; Grounded theory techniques revealed exercising control as the core category. Participants attempted to exercise control over student motivation, negative student behavior, student learning, and the complex lives of students. A system of inefficiency, the need for practical support, administration as a conduit for external accountability, a lack of administrative support, and a surprisingly complex and demanding teaching task emerged from the data as contextual conditions.; As Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, and Hoy (1998) suggest, participants' overall sense of teacher efficacy for this context was the result of a comparison between an assessment of teaching capabilities and an analysis of the teaching task. Mastery experiences were the most powerful source of efficacy building information with verbal persuasion, vicarious experiences, and physiological/emotional arousal also influencing efficacy beliefs. Findings suggest that sources of efficacy building information overlap with verbal persuasion and vicarious experiences contributing to the cognitive processing of mastery experiences. As the decision to return the following school year was linked to participants' sense of teaching efficacy, recommendations for those who work to support teachers are proposed.