1.3 Behavioral Factors

The third set of Bandura’s (2001b) SCT determinants are behavioral factors related to new teachers’ activity patterns. I identified four themes related to behavioral factors: maintaining personal-professional boundaries, connecting socially, planning, and enacting practice.

New teachers’ desire to maintain boundaries between their personal and professional lives involved conscious choices to keep aspects of their personal and professional lives distinct. For instance, Simone talked about improving her time management as a new teacher:

So at the beginning of the year, it was really rough for me. So when I first started teaching, I was doing plans week by week, I will plan my whole week out. And then this year, since I started the Master’s degree program, I didn’t want to bring any work home, and I didn’t want to stay late, and I’m not a early morning person. So then it was getting things done day by day.

In addition, because each of the new teachers I interviewed used social media in some capacity related to their teaching role, teachers’ personal and professional contexts could intersect, collide, and conflict in one digital space or app. New teachers consistently described how they worked to avoid this convergence effect of social media. Mike was one of the most regimented in his social media use and content consumption. He described:

I just can’t afford the time. I have to have time for my students, and I have to have time for myself. And if I don’t have time for myself, then I’m doing them a disservice. I have to have that shut-off button.

Generally, new teachers reported using Facebook and Instagram to sustain personal relationships, but a few teachers reported using Facebook groups to access professional communities of teachers or Instagram to follow other teachers. Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers, on the other hand, were viewed fully on the professional side. New teachers used these two platforms to find teaching resources when needed. Some teachers used Twitter for professional purposes only when required to for graduate school courses. Otherwise, Simone noted, “I use Twitter as my comedy,” and Taylor used Twitter to sustain a “decent following” of fans from her adjacent career as a professional athlete.

A consistent thread through new teachers’ discussions of social media was this desire to separate personal and professional. Julie succinctly summed up her approach: “I know what I’m getting myself into when I open each one of the apps.”

A second area of behavioral factors was connecting socially, activity that included both positive aspects of social glue and negative aspects of social comparison. New teachers reported positive social benefits of connecting with colleagues through professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools of teachers organized by grade level or subject. For instance, the physical education (PE) department in Taylor’s school shares an office, and PE teachers convene regularly throughout the day. The school policy is for departments to meet monthly, but other teachers joke that the PE department meets daily. Taylor described this PLC as a “tight-knit group” with a “group mentality” that functions not just as a source of teaching ideas, but a loyal in-group.

Mike described the importance of new teachers’ having social outlets for teaching-related frustrations:

I vent for my mental health. I vent to other teachers and other people about this stuff. I would say, frequently, just to be honest. And that’s scary to say, because I am at a premier school that has premier students, and it has great funding for electives and extracurriculars and resources and technology. Like, I couldn’t be at a better school.

New teachers often described their social media use in connecting terms. For instance, Anne noted: “A lot of times, if I go to social media, it’s for an outlet, for frustrations, and difficulties.” Simone talked about the benefit of getting perspective through connecting socially: “It’s always nice to see what other teachers are dealing with in their district or their state. Like, ‘Are you experiencing these same things?’ It’s nice to know that you’re not the only one.”

However, new teachers also described how connecting socially can be detrimental. Anne, teaching under difficult circumstances with few resources and a challenging physical environment, noted the challenges of seeing teachers in other districts present pristine classrooms on social media:

Back to the Instagram thing, I do follow some teacher accounts. Sometimes I feel like, it makes me feel like a crappy teacher, because I’m seeing them do all these things. And I’m like, “I’m tired right now. If I did all those things, I would either never sleep, or I would be just doing those things. I wouldn’t be able to follow through with them and actually teach with those tools that they’re spending hours making on the weekend.” And it just, it makes me feel like I should be doing more. But I already feel like I’m doing more than I can keep up with.

Julie perceived new teachers’ (and her own) social media use as primarily about sharing and finding resources. She expressed a desire for more genuine interaction and collaboration: “I wish there was more a way to use social media like, ‘Here’s a problem I’m dealing with; can people help me with this problem?’”

A third area of behavioral factors was planning. All teachers prepare for teaching ahead of time, which includes generating ideas, creating curriculum, writing lesson plans, and finding appropriate resources. Taylor and Blair, without undergraduate teacher preparation, struggled with creating a semester-long teaching plan. However, they were not alone in this difficulty. Because her district did not assign a curriculum to follow, Hallie, who graduated from one of the top teacher preparation programs in the U.S., nevertheless described her internal process of deciding what to teach in her specific school: “What am I supposed to do? Like, what do you actually want me to do?” She also acknowledged the openness of her colleagues, but limitations remained: “There are teachers that are willing to help, but because my team doesn’t do a lot of the actual same activity, it doesn’t really help to share planning resources, always.” Julie was candid about this issue: “I feel like I filled a lot of gaps. If I couldn’t find something, I’d go to social media to find it.”

Alongside challenges of unclear expectations and needing to fill gaps, an additional planning difficulty for new teachers is navigating the overwhelming number of possibilities of what and how to teach. New teachers’ efforts to seek induction supports from any sources possible, ranging from school colleagues to social media, sometimes result in too many ideas.

New teachers often turned to school colleagues for planning help, including team teachers, mentor teachers, and PLCs. However, Julie found the helpfulness of colleagues to be overwhelming at times:

I felt like a lot of teachers were saying, “Here, try this. Here, try this.” And I didn’t really have the time to fully plan out units or plan out weeks at all. I just, there was no time for that. A lot of people were just trying to throw me ideas and there weren’t people I could really go to for ideas.

The unidirectional flow of ideas from colleagues to new teachers seemed to be part of the trouble for Julie. She said she would rather have people she could seek out when she was ready to work on planning and encountered a challenge.

In addition, new teachers often reported turning to social media to find teaching resources while they were planning. Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers seemed to be the most popular platforms for this. New teachers described both browsing through potential resources as well as searching with a specific need in mind. Amelia found TeachersPayTeachers to be a good source for plans to leave for substitute teachers and a district Facebook group to be a good place to ask for curriculum and materials.

A fourth area of behavioral factors was enacting practice, where new teachers seek to improve their instruction and interactions with students in the classroom. New teachers’ exhibited this theme when they described issues like classroom management, student engagement, and helping students. For instance, Amelia, Anne, and Julie each talked extensively about difficult classroom management situations they had encountered, and how they worked through these in conversation with colleagues, mentor teachers, and principals. For instance, Hallie talked with her PLC about “embedding real learning ideas” in discussions of current events like voting instead of “reading a story and making it work with a standard.” She went on to say how figuring out her teaching practice in this way helps her as well as her students: “I enjoy my job a lot more teaching real things, and I think students come away with it more than just memorizing, and being able to do a standard on a standardized test.”

New teachers noted that social media help enact practice too. Taylor found that YouTube videos are especially use to demonstrate activities for her PE classes. Julie noted she did not always turn to social media to figure out what to teach, but sometimes to refine an existing plan: “I still do a lot of that stuff, just somewhat in the same ways and somewhat with some extra TeachersPayTeachers flair.”