1.2 Personal Factors

The second set of Bandura’s (2001b) SCT determinants are personal factors specific to an individual new teacher. I identified two themes related to personal factors: teacher capital and teaching beliefs conflicting with those held by colleagues.

Teacher capital can be understood as resources priorly held by or inherent to a new teacher as they enter the teaching profession. These resources include social capital (i.e., resources related to interpersonal connections) and cultural capital (i.e., resources related to knowledge and skills). An example of social capital was Wallace’s ability to ask other teachers and staff for help during his first year, something he was more comfortable doing because he had worked on staff at the school prior to starting as a teacher. He also noted that being connected to colleagues on Facebook reinforced these in-school relationships by giving him additional understanding of his co-workers.

Taylor and Blair demonstrated a lack of cultural capital. They both work as specialist teachers in wealthy private schools, albeit in different states, and they both reported having many material resources and supportive colleagues. However, because they did not study education as undergraduates, they felt like they were missing some foundational teaching skills. Taylor noted: “There’s planning, there’s preparation, but I think there’s something completely different to understanding how to organize a class, how to organize a lesson, how to build that up throughout the entire year.” As a school educational technology specialist, Blair commented on lacking a teacher’s identity:

I didn’t really view myself as an educator, but like, the second I walked into a school, I was Ms. Blair. And I’d never been called that in my life. And it’s because kids don’t care what my position is. The fact that I’m an adult in this building means I’m a teacher.

These teacher capital examples illustrate how new teachers sought induction supports because they knew who to ask, they felt like they were missing essential teaching skills, or because they were needing to step into a novel professional identity.

A second area of personal factors pertained to conflict, the tension between new teachers’ previously held beliefs about teaching and those encountered in their school of employment. This tension manifested in a variety of ways. For instance, Julie experienced dissonance with her school’s strict policy on classroom management and student discipline. She characterized school norms as “We run a tight ship,” with teachers expected to send students to a responsible thinking classroom (RTC) following any violation of classroom rules, even minor infractions. Julie disagreed with this policy and expressed her opinion to her principal:

I’m only going to do RTC when it gets to this point. I’m not going to do RTC every single day. That’s just not something that I can justify. And for a lot of those kids, it doesn’t work. I don’t really see the success in it.

Hallie, as a first-year teacher, described dissonance with her more experienced colleagues around curricular issues: “I have one teacher who just wants to use curriculum from 30 years ago. And I’m just like, ‘I can’t do it.’ There are just completely irrelevant things.” Hallie also advocated for the inclusion of more antiracism materials in the elementary school curriculum. When her colleagues complained about their students’ reactions to discussing racism during Black History Month, Hallie responded:

Well, that’s the problem. It’s uncharted, and it’s February. And now you’re talking about Black people, because it’s Black History Month, and you’ve never talked about race before. And you have one Black student in your class.

These examples illustrate how new teachers must choose the degree of conflict they are willing to have with colleagues around issues of student discipline or racism, among other important topics where educational thinking has changed in recent years.