Resilience & Retention: Helping STEM Teachers Thrive

Excelling as a teacher is not just about receiving the right training. It is also about connecting with colleagues, finding their place in a school’s environment, and adapting to student needs.

While those attributes apply to every subject area, Pacific University Professor of Education Kevin Carr is using a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the resilience of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers, specifically, in Oregon.

Funded through the foundation’s Noyce Scholars program, the study takes a deep look into the careers of Noyce Scholars from Pacific University’s College of Education, the University of Oregon and the University of Portland to gain insight into the retention and cultural effectiveness of STEM teachers in high-need schools in Oregon.

The goal of the study, Carr said, is to build on data-based studies on teacher retention and resilience by adding context through the first-person experiences of teachers.

“We are using an approach called narrative inquiry, where instead of looking at a teacher’s experiences through a survey or interview, we instead ask each teacher to tell us their career story,” Carr said. “The goal for us as researchers is to support our teachers in researching and writing their own teaching stories, providing an in-depth view of their rich experiences that is hard to achieve in other kinds of research.”

Now in its third year, the study began with 100 STEM teachers participating in a career overview survey, asking teachers about their classroom experiences and past and future career trajectories. From that group, 40 teachers engaged in a 90-minute interview, building off the data provided in the initial survey.

The group was narrowed again to 18 teachers who will develop an autoethnography, a type of research-based autobiographical narrative, that will provide the bulk of the data that Carr and his fellow researchers will use to develop the results of the study.

While the results are preliminary, Carr said that the narratives are already revealing commonalities in the ability to adapt to changing classroom and building environments.

“Being successful as a teacher over a long period of time means being resilient to all of those changes and resilient to the fact that students are all different. One thing doesn’t work the same for everyone,” Carr said. “Everything is a little trial, everything is reflected on, everything is subject to revision. How people frame the work of teaching and end up thriving as teachers within that seems to be important.”

The other common thread that Carr and his fellow researchers, including fellow College of Education faculty member Jason Niedermeyer and researchers from Education Northwest, have found is the ability of teachers to find their niche in their chosen environment, both academically and culturally.

“We’re thinking of it like an ecological model where an organism tends to evolve to fit into an environment and actually has a way of changing the environment too,” Carr said. “Finding your niche is influencing the environment and making it better, but if the environment changes too much, it might be impossible to find your niche.”

The focus on STEM teachers is tied to Pacific’s involvement in the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships covering up to full tuition and a living expense stipend for science and math teaching candidates in Pacific’s one-year Master of Arts in Teaching program. Participants in the Noyce Scholar program commit to at least two years of teaching in a high-needs school following graduation.

At the end of the study, Carr hopes to make parts of the autoethnographic studies available through videos and through publications that could be distributed to school districts nationwide. There is also hope that the study could spin off into larger studies on teacher resiliency and retention.

In the short term, Carr is finding ways to implement the findings into his own teaching as he helps prepare the next generation of Pacific students to enter the classroom. The more prepared they are to adapt, he said, the better the chance for a long and fulfilling career.

“It seems important for teachers to frame the teaching process in terms of hope,” Carr said. “In teaching, you’re always in a process of tinkering, trial and error, and redesigning. You don’t learn to teach once — you are always changing and adapting. But if you learn to relish the process of experimenting with different teaching practices and find out what works, you find that there are big upsides for the students and yourself as a teacher.

“Now we’re asking, ‘How do we develop that mindset better as we prepare teachers? How do we get that started as much as possible before our students are being in charge of their own classrooms?’ Because we think the people who end up with long careers somehow get there.”