Abstract
Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive article examines preservice teachers’ expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career. Using data from a large teacher education program in Texas, we use a natural language processing algorithm to categorize into topical groups roughly 2,800 essay responses to the prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We identify 10 topics that largely reflect altruistic and intrinsic (although not extrinsic) reasons for teaching. The frequency of topics varied substantially by preservice teacher gender, race/ethnicity, and certification area. Intrinsic enjoyment of teaching and experiences with adversity predicted higher clinical teaching performance and lower attrition as a full-time teacher.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
