2.2 Latent Supports

New Teachers identified many additional potential supports besides those that had been formally assigned to them. In some cases, they recognized a support’s potential helpfulness but chose not to use it. New teachers chose not to pursue these latent supports for a variety of reasons. For instance, Amelia voiced how helpful it would be to have a district-wide gathering of music teachers, but it may not have occurred to her that she could have helped to organize this group. Mike recognized that social media like Twitter represented opportunities for support for new teachers, but he chose not to use Twitter because his primary concern was managing his time. Similarly, Hallie and Simone were more compelled by personal-professional boundaries than social media benefits. Like Mike, Taylor saw Twitter’s potential for interactions amongst new teachers but chose not to pursue these because she perceived Twitter discourse as being constrained by the platform’s limits on message length.

Because these latent supports were not assigned as part of the new teachers’ job requirements, they represented opportunities for self-directed learning that could be on-demand, just-in-time, and as-needed. However, this could alternatively be viewed as volunteering personal time to work. Blair was blunt about this:

There were times when different teachers, like that one teacher I really liked working with, would say, “Oh, if you ever have downtime, you can just come to my classroom and observe or help out so you get more experience.” And, and in the moment I was like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea!” But then like, when the time actually came, I was like, “No, I don’t want to go work when I’m not working.”

In this case, Blair admired the teacher making this invitation. Her reticence to pursue these supports was linked more to her limited capacity as a new teacher: “I feel like there are more things like that, when there is an opportunity to learn more, that I don’t take because I don’t feel like it, because I would rather do nothing.”