Conference presentation
Early career teachers' instructional quality: profiles and correlates
AARE 2025 Conference (Newcastle, Australia)
AARE 2025 (Newcastle, Australia, 01/12/2025–04/12/2025)
02/12/2025
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Abstract
The first few years in the teaching profession marks an important milestone in a teacher’s professional life as they transition from pre-service teacher training to the real world of teaching. Although pre-service teacher training programs primarily aims to equip pre-service teachers with the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions for a smooth transition, early career teachers are likely to experience the reality shock as they encounter the dramatic and traumatic complexity of the everyday classroom as opposed to the idealism forged during initial teacher education. Understanding and supporting early career teachers’ instructional practices, therefore, is critical for their later professional development. This study adopted a unique person-centred approach to examining early career teachers’ instructional quality with the aim of providing implications for the development of targeted teacher professional learning initiatives that cater to different groups of early career teachers with different instructional needs. Latent profile analysis conducted on a sample of 712 early career teachers in Australia drawn from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 data revealed five distinct profiles of instructional quality: a laissez-faire group (41.9%) with below-average levels of classroom management and instructional clarity, a controlling group (12.5%) with frequent use of classroom management strategies, a low instructional clarity group (9.7%) with low level of instructional clarity, a high instructional clarity group (28.4%) with high level of clarity of instruction, and an exemplar group (7.5%) with equally high levels across all instructional quality indicators. Follow-up multinomial logistic regression analyses suggested that teacher self-efficacy and formal mentorship were statistically associated with the likelihood of teacher membership in these five profiles. The findings offer important implications for early career teacher education and teacher professional development. For example, ECTs in the laissez-faire profile are more likely to benefit from professional development programs that target classroom management and instructional clarity skills whereas those in the controlling profile need a more balanced approach to managing the classroom to enable them to exercise effective teaching strategies and higher-order thinking skills. Likewise, teachers in the laissez-faire profile are in greater need of professional development that builds up their self-efficacy in classroom management and instructional strategies while those in the controlling and low instructional clarity profiles will reap greater benefits from having a formally assigned mentor.
Details
- Title
- Early career teachers' instructional quality: profiles and correlates
- Creators
- Vo Hoi Dr - Southern Cross UniversityDavid Turner Dr - Southern Cross UniversityDavid Lynch Professor - Southern Cross UniversityDeclan Forrester - Southern Cross UniversityTony Yeigh Associate Professor - Southern Cross UniversityLana McCarthy - Southern Cross UniversityTom Casey - St Andrews Lutheran College (Australia, Gold Coast)
- Conference
- AARE 2025 (Newcastle, Australia, 01/12/2025–04/12/2025)
- Event
- AARE 2025 Conference (Newcastle, Australia)
- Identifiers
- 991013322327702368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation