Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Thesis (UNI Access Only)

Keywords

Resilience (Personality trait); High school teachers--Job stress--Texas; Employee retention--Texas;

Abstract

Resignation among novice teachers has been well-documented and remains a problem for educators, administration, and students in a variety of educational settings. Between 25% and 50% of new teachers will resign within three years (Fleener, 2001; Voke, 2002). New teachers who remain in the profession beyond these first three years may be considered “resilient” for the purposes of the current project. This research proposal is grounded in the theory of risk and resilience in general, and teacher resilience specifically. Literature exists that examines teacher resiliency, but much less is known about how teacher retention and resiliency may be different among “high-risk” schools, “high-achieving” schools, and charter schools. This research proposal reviews relevant literature, and proposes a qualitative research project that examines characteristics of resilient teachers in a “high-risk” but “high-achieving” charter school that has been plagued by high rates of teacher turn-over. The schools are considered “high-risk” based on a high rate of poverty, and are considered “high-achieving” based on state assessment data, college-preparedness data, percentage of students taking college preparatory classes, high-school graduation rates, and a 100% college acceptance rate.

Participating schools were selected based on their participation in a larger research project conducted by Dr. Michelle Tichy that used survey and interview methodology to examine student resilience within the selected school system. For the current proposed project, teachers from the participating schools will be selected to participate in semi-structured interviews based on survey responses that indicate they experience job satisfaction and moderate to significant stress. Interview questions were developed based on teacher resilience literature, and pre-determined codes will be used to analyze data based on a confirmatory (or hypothesis-driven) approach (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012). Interviewee responses will be coded and the frequency of coded responses will be compared to the existing literature to investigate whether teacher resilience in the participating schools is similar or unique when compared to the findings of other studies.

Year of Submission

2015

Degree Name

Specialist in Education

Department

Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations

First Advisor

Michelle Tichy, Chair

Date Original

2015

Object Description

1 PDF file (iv, 27 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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