Paper short abstract:

With new teachers often leaving the profession before finding success with it, more attention to teacher induction—to the cultural task of welcoming new teachers to schools and helping them succeed at and find affirmation from it—is merited. I examine the design logic for induction in a US project.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how a cultural orientation to teacher induction, the early career phase new teachers negotiate as they enter the profession, can inform the design of university-based induction support efforts for US teachers in schools with high enrollments of students from non-dominant backgrounds. Such schools more often struggle academically and have higher teacher turnover rates making for fraught cycles where new teachers come, struggle, leave, and then are replaced by more new and novice teachers. The described induction efforts are university-based and part of a larger, multi-faceted engagement attempting both to reverse hard-to-staff dynamics and to assure that new teachers who do stay become more and more efficacious as educators of the diverse enrollments they are charged with teaching. The paper considers tools (e.g., online graduate classes, formation of an 'induction cohort' of new practitioners, partnership with school district HR teams) that university-based practitioners can enact to support successful teacher induction and how they are grounded by various cultural logics. To become members of a "community of practice" (Wenger 1998), new practitioners need to figure out what the norms are for teaching professionals in their environment and (a) how to meet those norms, but (b) how to transcend those norms if/when they include deficit ideologies or other hazards that propose that some students cannot succeed and/or do not merit attention. Induction lends itself to both anthropological scrutiny and application of anthropological lessons as it focuses on how one is welcomed by and finds their place in school.