Choosing to Stay: The Voluntary Retention Decisions of Highly-Effective Teachers in Challenging School Contexts
Graduate School of Education, College of Professional Studies, Northeastern University
How they used Delve
A doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University used Delve for the electronic stages of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of eight semi-structured interviews with highly-effective New Jersey teachers who chose to stay in challenging schools, clustering emergent themes and collapsing subordinate themes under superordinate ones.
“At this point in the process, the analysis process was shifted into electronic format, housed in the Delve qualitative analysis software, which allowed the organization, clustering, and visualization of data in various ways throughout the analysis process. [...] Using the Delve qualitative analysis software, themes were clustered and visually oriented around one another to illustrate their connections and move further toward abstraction and emergent analytical meaning.”
- Field
- teacher retention; educational leadership; K-12 public schools in New Jersey
- Data
- 8 semi-structured 60-90-minute Zoom interviews with highly-effective K-12 teachers in New Jersey who voluntarily remained in challenging school contexts (schools scoring 60 or fewer points on the 2017-2018 NJ School Report Card)
- Approach
- Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009; Smith & Osborn), case-by-case; hand annotation on paper first, then theme development and clustering in Delve
- Data types
- Interviews
Abstract
This doctoral research study examined the lived experiences of eight highly-effective teachers in New Jersey who have voluntarily chosen to remain working in their challenging school contexts, defined as schools scoring 60 or fewer points on the 2017-2018 NJ School Report Card summative rating. Data from semi-structured interviews was analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), resulting in three major findings regarding the retention decisions of participants: (1) Highly-effective teachers need to perceive that their extraordinary efforts and performance are understood and proportionally valued; (2) The existence of positive relationships and connections is important to the satisfaction and retention decisions of highly-effective teachers; and (3) Trust and empowerment, as expressed through leadership opportunities and classroom autonomy, are important to highly-effective teachers. These findings were considered in light of the existing body of research as well as the theoretical framework, Meyer and Allen’s (1991) Three-Component Model of Organizational Commitment (TCM). The findings of this study suggested that highly-effective teachers experienced a variety of positive and negative experiences working in their challenging schools and made sense of these experiences in relation to one another and to their prior experiences and ideal work conditions when deciding whether to continue working in their school context.
Citation
Christina M. Egan (2022). Choosing to Stay: The Voluntary Retention Decisions of Highly-Effective Teachers in Challenging School Contexts. Northeastern University Repository.