The Mid-Career Transition to Teaching​ Program, partnering with the DoE to support aspiring teachers as they shift from STEM professions to a career in teaching.

Description

The Mid-Career Transition to Teaching​ Program: MQ's executive mentoring approach to​ transition.​

The research focus or problem

Whilst the induction phase or first year(s) of teaching has received ample attention, attrition rates remain consistently high with many teachers leaving within the first five years of in-service teaching (März & Keltchermans, 2020). Beginning teachers are required to navigate highly intricate and nuanced demands upon entry to the profession, challenges which require specialised support (Marent et al, 2020). With research confirming this ongoing phenomenon and the potential negative impacts of teacher shortages for students and the community at large, continued investigation is warranted to develop more insightful and effective measures to better support teachers transitioning the profession. Research suggests that there are complex entanglements between agentic and structural factors during the beginning years of teaching that impact long term career decisions (Marent et al, 2020). This project responds to a call for longitudinal studies to investigate this nuanced intertwinement between transitioning teachers, their initial teacher education (ITE) program and their school environment. This is explored through the potential role university programs play as an enabling factor in transition to the profession, and to uncover potential links between ITE and long-term commitment to the profession.



Conceptual framework informing the research

With a strong focus on student empowerment, the MQ Executive Mentoring Model employs an individualised student first approach to supporting students in the transition to teaching. The four quadrants of the MQ Executive Mentoring Model are academic, school, teaching area and transition to help frame supports in each key area. This model is informed by the conceptual framework that informs this research, Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) (2000) and its associate referent model has been employed to identify and analyse the various factors which enable and constrain pre-service and beginning teachers in their transition to in-service practice. The theory is well suited to apprehend the complexity of development (Tudge 2008), of pre-service and beginning teachers, as Brofenbrenner’s (2000) central tenet focusses on what human beings may become tomorrow. EST helps to conceptualise the interconnectedness and intersectionality of the relationships between a person, their microsystem and environment in which they live (Fearnley 2020). Individuals, and in this instance pre-service and beginning teachers, do not therefore develop in isolation but in relation to their family, work, school, community and society at large. The core of the approach is a set of multiple layers, represented as nested structures; the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem. The individual sits in the centre of the microsystem, which is surrounded by the mesosystem. The mesosystem represents the relationships between the microsystems such as school or family; it has direct impact and influence on the microsystem. In schools, the microsystem could be defined as the beginning teacher and the mesosystem is the school in which they work. 

Period	29 Nov 2023
Event title	AARE 2023 Annual Conference: Truth, Voice, Place: Critical junctures for educational research.
Event type	Conference
Location	Melbourne, Australia, VictoriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National