Explore the vast range of titles available.

There is much alarm about the current teacher shortage resulting from the pandemic and its aftermath. But teacher shortages have long been a perennial issue in K-12 education. Researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry Tran analyzed data from the National Center of Education Statistics to compare rural schools to urban and suburban schools to understand their teacher staffing problems. They found that rural teacher shortages are worse than elsewhere and are driven by teacher turnover and hence won’t be solved just by focusing on new teacher recruitment. High-poverty rural schools and rural schools with high levels of students of color face the most extreme teacher turnover of all schools, experiencing departures of between a quarter and a third of teachers annually. Their reasons for leaving include lack of classroom autonomy and the inability to be included in schoolwide decision making.

Teacher wellbeing has received widespread and increasing global attention over the last decade due to high teacher turnover, growing teacher shortages, and the goal of improving the quality of teaching and student performance. No review has yet sought to undertake a cumulative quantitative assessment of the literature pertaining to teacher wellbeing. Using meta-analysis, we address this gap by systematically examining the relative strength of key antecedents, consequences, and correlates of teacher wellbeing, using the Job Demands-Resources theory as a guide to positioning factors in the nomological network. Following PRISMA guidelines, our systematic search yielded 173 eligible studies for inclusion (N = 89,876). Results showed that hope, autonomous motivation, psychological capital and job competencies were the top four strongest positive predictors of overall wellbeing, whereas neuroticism and disengagement coping were the top two strongest negative predictors. Occupational commitment was the strongest positive consequence of overall wellbeing, and turnover intentions were the strongest negative consequence. Burnout and work engagement were the strongest correlates of overall wellbeing. We also found that some effects were moderated by factors such as whether teachers were in-service or pre-service, and the educational setting (e.g., K-12, initial teacher education). Our review provides a useful empirical resource that may help guide practice in terms of how teachers, school leaders, and policy makers can support teacher wellbeing.

This article investigates the key factors associated with Australian teachers' intentions to leave their roles by examining their working conditions, experiences of work and mental health through the concept of the psychosocial work environment. Utilising a dataset of 744 primary and secondary teachers in mainstream Australian government schools, we applied confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model of teachers’ working conditions and health and wellbeing. This was followed by stepwise regression on a total of 36 variables related to teachers’ working conditions and health and wellbeing to select 14 key explanatory variables for our linear regression model. We employed mixed-effects and linear regression analyses to examine the association between 14 key variables and teachers’ intentions to leave. Our analysis indicated that several factors were negatively associated with teachers’ intentions to leave their roles, including commitment to the school, job satisfaction and meaning of work. In contrast, a greater number of factors were positively associated with intentions to leave, including emotional demands, conflict between work and family life, exposure to work-related violence, workload, stress and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the analysis identified career stage as a significant factor associated with intention to leave, with mid-career teachers and late-mid-career/advanced-career teachers in the sample being more likely to express intentions to leave than their early career counterparts. By drawing on the concept of the psychosocial work environment and considering working conditions, experiences of work and mental health, this study identifies key factors that are worthy of further research attention, provides a broad, exploratory conceptual approach to understand how these variables are interconnected and underscores the necessity of holistic integrated approaches to promoting teacher retention.

Teachers are critical to student learning, but adequately staffing classrooms has been challenging in many parts of the country. Though teacher shortages are widely reported, they are poorly understood, particularly in terms of the magnitude and variation of the shortages, and reported figures are often localized and anecdotal. To address this gap, we systematically examine news reports, Department of Education data, and publicly available information on teacher shortages for every U.S. state. We characterize the data landscape and find there are at least 39,700 vacant positions along with at least 288,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally. We discuss the implications of our findings for improving data systems, including more specific and consistent reporting of shortage, as well as implications for teacher preparation and education policy.

The recruitment and retention of teachers in regional, rural and remote areas of Australia remains a persistent challenge. Greater awareness of and experience in regional, rural and remote schools is a common strategy adopted by initial teacher education providers to mediate this challenge. This paper examines the quality of connection between preservice teachers and a regional community developed through a multi-university placement program. The program adopted a multi-faceted approach to building quality community connections—fostering preservice teacher connections to a cohort of preservice teachers, to regional schools, and to a regional area. Findings suggest this tripartite approach enhanced the quality of all connections, positioning the program as a useful model for developing a pipeline of preservice teachers to regional schools struggling to find teaching staff.

Since the end of World War II, international leaders have made calls addressing the world language teacher shortage. For almost 70 years, such rhetoric has been advanced, yet world language teacher shortages remain in many countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In this article, the authors discuss the past and current state of affairs of the shortage before advancing ideas for language teacher recruitment and retention to which a variety of stakeholders (e.g., parents, administrators, language teacher associations) can contribute immediately in order to address the world language teacher shortage in earnest. Challenges Since the end of World War II, international leaders have called attention to the world language teacher shortage, yet the shortage exists more than 70 years later. What immediate, active steps and initiatives can be taken to remedy this situation? Video & Discussion

In this paper, we report on some early findings from a project that explores the experiences of teacher shortages in hard-to-staff schools in Australia. We provide an in-depth account of the experiences of teachers who remain at schools characterised by unfilled vacancies, high staff turnover and a limited casual relief workforce. These experiences are often overlooked because most studies concerning teacher shortages typically analyse such issues through a labour market lens, concentrating on supply and demand and the extent and causes of the shortages. We use a work-storied approach that includes data from purposeful conversations, walking interviews, work-shadowing and journals, to examine the impact of teacher shortages on schools with low scores on the index of community socio-educational advantage across rural and metropolitan. This research explores how school leaders and teachers who remain in their roles respond to the challenges of teacher shortages. It examines the strategies they respond to these issues, focusing on how they adapt and modify organisational structures and norms to manage the impacts. We demonstrate how teacher shortages cause ripple effects across schools that create challenges beyond filling vacancies: the hard-to-staff schools in our study must simultaneously manage high teacher turnover, attrition, induction, out-of-field teaching, teacher workload capacity, and student behaviour issues. Ultimately, the current workforce conditions force strategic responses to unfilled vacancies and high teacher turnover in ways that intensify the already high-pressure working conditions for teachers and school leaders.

This article addresses the ethical question concerning how educational research helps immigrant teachers gain authority and ownership over their self-understanding and self-becoming. By critically examining prior research and analysing the dominant discourse surrounding this specific group, we highlight the limitations and ethical implications of existing findings. We problematise current methodological approaches ito advocate for the necessity of counter-narratives. By empowering immigrant teachers to ‘author(w)rite’ their own accounts, this form of authorship broadens scholarly discourse, allowing them to pursue self-understanding and assert agency over their narratives. To illustrate our contention, we present our counter-narratives in the form of satirical poetry within boxed texts, highlighting the need to expand and complicate conventional research practices. Through subversive discourse, we emphasise more empowering methodologies in the ethical interpretation and representation of immigrant teacher participants. We suggest that counter-narratives offer an alternative lens through which to examine the lived realities and emotions of immigrant teachers, ultimately enriching scholarly discussions and fostering a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of their humanity.

Current teacher attrition in Australia and globally has created an untenable situation for many schools, teachers and the profession. This paper reports on research that examined the critical issue of teacher attrition from the perspective of former classroom teachers and school leaders. Although there is extensive national and global research related to teacher shortages and intentions to leave the teaching profession, minimal research has sought insights from those who have left the profession in Australia, including ascertaining what they are doing now. Using an online survey, data were collected from 256 former teachers from all states and territories, sectors and career stages who had left the profession between 2016 and 2022. Using descriptive statistical and thematic analysis, this study highlights the potential loss to teaching and the education profession more broadly due to teacher attrition. For these participants, the reasons for leaving were often multifaceted and the process of leaving was often protracted. Many of these former teachers have maintained links to the education profession occupying various associated roles and positions. We call for a reconsideration of the ways that strategies to ameliorate teacher attrition are conceptualised and implemented. [Author abstract]

We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that schools and districts that host fewer student teachers or are nearby to districts that host fewer student teachers tend to hire significantly more new teachers with emergency credentials the following year. These relationships are robust to district fixed-effects specifications that make comparisons across schools within the same district. This descriptive evidence suggests exploring efforts to place student teachers in schools and districts that struggle to staff their classrooms.