1. Special Stayers or Striving Leavers?:
The Role of Personality in Teacher Retention
Brady K. Jones
Human Development and Social Policy Program, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy
Introduction
Teacher retention is an important public policy question. Previous research focuses only on variables external to educators, such as school characteristics or financial incentives, and ignores aspects of teacher personality.
In this study, I test whether long-term teachers fit either of two dominant cultural myths of what long-term K-12 educators are like (Lortie, 1975): special (psychologically healthy and especially generous) or practical (concerned with job and income stability and risk-averse).
Sample and Data
The Teacher Personality and Teacher Retention Study is a mixed-methods study examining how personality is related to teacher commitment. Variables associated with all three levels of McAdams’ Model of Personality (traits, characteristic adaptations, and personal narratives) were collected.
Sample:
120 teachers and former teachers, all graduates of a competitive teacher prep program (successful applicants’ GRE scores in the 70th-80th percentile)
Measures:
Age
School urbanity
School student/teacher ratio
School % white students
School % free/reduced lunch
Trait-level variables:
Big 5 traits (extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness)
Characteristic adaptations-level variables:
Generativity
Psychological capital
Generativity of personal goals
Difficulty of personal goals
Relative valuing of achievement
Relative valuing of power
Narrative-level goals:
Redemptive narratives
Agentic narratives
Integration of agency/communion in narratives
Hypotheses:
Under The Special Teacher hypothesis, we would expect high scores in extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, generativity, psy capital, redemptive narratives, and a/c integration narratives and low scores in neuroticism.
Under The Practical Teacher hypothesis, we would expect low scores in extraversion, openness, goal difficulty, achievement, power, and agentic narratives.
Conclusions
Limitations
Initial correlations suggest more support for The Special Teacher hypothesis ( for correlation table or with other questions).
Hierarchical regressions also suggest there is more evidence in this sample for The Special Teacher hypothesis. Depending on what variables are controlled for, long-term teachers report more generative goals, more agency/communion integration in personal narratives, higher openness to experience, lower neuroticism, and even more ambitious goals.
There is some evidence that teachers in more difficult school situations rely more heavily on trait-level variables to sustain their commitment to the occupation.
There is a small piece of evidence for The Practical Teacher hypothesis. Long-term teachers report valuing achievement less than individuals who left classroom teaching.
The small sample size and large number of variables means I may be missing some meaningful but subtle relationships between personality and long-term commitment.
Hierarchical regressions may wash out the effects of some variables; we cannot disentangle the impact of one personality variable without controlling for all of the others.
The study was conducted with an elite sample that differs in important ways from the teaching population as a whole.
The study tells us nothing about whether good teachers stay more often than bad ones. If bad teachers leave the profession at higher rates, retention becomes less important.
References
Lortie, D.C. (1975). Schoolteacher (2nd ed.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.