A longitudinal study of teaching: Practice and early career decisions: A cautionary tale

Cochran-Smith, M., McQuillan, P., Mitchell, K., Terrell, D. G., Barnatt, J., D’Souza, L., Jong, C., Shakman, K., Lam, K.,Gleeson, A. M. (2012). A longitudinal study of teaching: Practice and early career decisions: A cautionary tale. American Educational Research Journal, 49(5), 844-880.


Teaching is a difficult job. It is difficult to fully comprehend the challenges that teaching presents until one is actually in the classroom. According to statistics quoted in this article by Cochran-Smith and her colleagues, almost half of new teachers leave the new teaching profession before their careers are very old. In some cases, of course, that is a beneficial decision for all concerned. If the “fit” is not there, no one benefits. In other cases, though, the effects are less clear, as is clearly pointed out in this article. As they studied 15 beginning teachers from their time in a one-year certification program and into their first few years of teaching, Cochran-Smith et al discovered that there was much variation in the abilities of those beginning teachers, and that this variation was linked to each teacher’s unique career trajectory.

As a teacher educator myself, I have long maintained that just as K-12 educators must struggle to meet a wide range of needs and abilities among the children in their classrooms, the challenge of teacher educators is the same. Our teacher candidates have just as wide a range of needs and abilities. After all, they are products of the K-12 system. It is not surprising that we cannot treat them as if they all possess the same strengths and face the same challenges. That was certainly true in the sample studied here, even though all of them were high academic achievers from “selective” (p. 850) colleges. If you believe that all it takes to succeed in the classroom is strong content knowledge, that belief is challenged by the experiences of the sample in this study. If that were true, all of them could be expected to be successful teachers and to stay and flourish in their school contexts for many productive years. Teachers who can do that can be forces for positive change in their schools. That’s not what happened here, though. Although about half of the 15 could be seen as “successful”; the others had a range of experiences and success levels. I have certainly observed these kinds of proportions among my own preservice students, but I’ve sometimes thought it was because I teach in a fairly open, inclusive university where we take almost everyone and the criteria for admission are not particularly high. This study shows that my thinking was probably inaccurate. Even when programs are academically selective, some beginning teachers struggle, some fail, some succeed, some flourish, and some eventually opt out.

Cochran-Smith et al here outline five continua that help to describe the range of experience in this admittedly small sample of 15 beginning teachers. They looked at the quality of each teacher’s practice in conjunction with their experiences and career choices. Whether a teacher‘s classroom practice was evaluated as successful or not seemed to be an important factor in how his or her career trajectory turned out. We read about Configuration 1: Going Strong and Staying On (those whose practice was strong and remained at one school), Configuration 2: Going Strong but Moving Along (those whose practice was strong but changed schools), Configuration 3: Middling, Then Moving (those with adequate but not stellar practice who changed schools), Configuration 4: Falling Short but Hanging On (those with low practice scores who somehow managed to stay in teaching), and Configuration 5: Falling Short and Getting Out (those whose practice was low and who left teaching early). One proposed configuration, teachers with strong practice but who still leave teaching, was observed in one study participant, but the sample being small, it was difficult to form solid conclusions when the numbers in the category (and in several other of the Configurations) were not large.

In general, the patterns seen here echo my own experience, though the setting in which I work is quite different from the one described here. I feel that I know these beginning teachers. In fact, in my own dissertation work, I outlined analogous categories, using a swimming metaphor; I described the Swimmers, Thrashers, Floaters, and Drowners in the teacher education program that I observed in the university where I was completing my graduate degree. That was over twenty years ago now, but the range of abilities, and the struggles that beginning teachers face as they try to build their identities and their careers, are the same. We still aren’t doing any better at helping those who have the talent for teaching to flourish, or at gently counseling those who should not be teachers (regardless of their academic achievements) to move in other directions. It’s clear that for the good of the students who need their help the most, we need teachers who are mainly of the Going Strong and Staying On configuration. What is not so clear is how we can recruit, retain, and nurture those kinds of beginning teachers.