What if why you choose to become a teacher determines how successful you will be in the role?

Society has always been fascinated to learn about the motivations of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians and how they came to their profession. We think about their career trajectory and consider its relevance to ourselves or people we know. What if, similarly, we learned about the motivations of aspiring K-12 teachers, and used that to predict how effective they will be and how long they will stay in the classroom?

Persistent concerns reiterate teacher shortages throughout the nation. Recent evidence has also pointed to declining interest in becoming a teacher, aligned with the decreased professionalization, prestige and pay of the sector. Yet noble individuals press forward and choose to educate our children anyway. Why, in spite of the headwinds, do they become teachers?

As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we’re fascinated by this question. We figured that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand teacher pipelines and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our nation’s teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.

From 2012-2018, nearly 2,800 preservice teachers within one of the largest teacher preparation programs in Texas responded to an essay prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We used a natural language processing algorithm to review their responses.

Historically, people went into teaching for relatively straightforward reasons: They desired a stable career, enjoyed having summers off, or had family members who were teachers. However, across the essay responses, we found that those motivations were not the most prevalent, nor were they related to teacher outcomes — but others were.

Studying Preservice Teacher Motivations

Previously, researchers have primarily looked at in-service teacher motivations. Rather than learning from someone who is already in the profession, we wanted to learn from those who have yet to enter the profession. This better informs our understanding of how to get someone interested in teaching to then aid recruitment.

Using machine learning to process the thousands of open-ended essay responses, we identified 10 broad reasons for why preservice teachers want to become teachers.

The two most frequent drivers were altruism (the desire to do selfless good) and intrinsic motivation (an enjoyment of teaching, helping or interacting with students or children). Other interesting but less frequently cited motivations include the impact of prior teachers, love of a content area, and a family connection to teaching.

Interestingly, motivations differed by preservice teachers’ characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, gender, family income and certification.

For instance, individuals seeking their elementary certification were more likely to enjoy working with children, whereas middle and high school preservice teachers were interested in teaching a particular content area. Relatedly, men were less likely than women to report that they had “always wanted to teach.” This suggests that background characteristics can shape motivations to become a teacher.

Further, and more importantly, we found that some teacher motivations were related to better teacher outcomes. While altruism was the most frequent answer given, it wasn’t the one most strongly correlated with effectiveness.

Specifically, preservice teachers who shared that they were intrinsically motivated to teach and had experienced some adversity within schools were found to be both more effective educators and less likely to leave the classroom prematurely. Individuals who had these two motivating factors had a significant and positive correlation with their clinical teaching observation scores, and were less likely to leave the K-12 public school system within their first several years of entry.

Though these were modest effects, the fact that written self-reports of teaching motivation had even some significance with these outcomes is noteworthy. Motivations are no longer just interesting; they can be consequential.

From Motivations to Marketing

By better understanding teacher motivations, we can learn more about who could succeed in the profession. More precisely, we want to find individuals who are intrinsically motivated to teach or have overcome adversity within education spaces.

These future teachers could be like the following study participant who expressed how adversity and the impact of prior teachers motivated them to become a teacher:

“The statistics are stacked against someone with my background. Living in an impoverished neighborhood and struggling to learn English as my second language, and a daughter of Mexican immigrant parents who didn’t even get to finish primary school … I was fortunate to have many teachers who became my role models … I want to pay forward what my teachers did for me.”

How can we get these kinds of people into the classroom?

First, states need to consider long-term solutions to teacher shortages, including finding and nudging motivated individuals into educator preparation programs. Policymakers could invest in early teaching opportunities such as tutoring programs or summer programs with an explicit design to encourage individuals to consider careers in education and teaching (consider Breakthrough Collaborative as an example).

Second, teacher preparation programs need to prioritize strategic marketing, particularly in places where intrinsic motivation for teaching occurs more naturally (think: high schools, college campuses and child care centers).

Third, school districts could consider teacher motivations as part of their hiring process. Considering all else equal, it may be worth gaining insight into applicants’ interest in teaching, since our research indicates some motivations lead to more effective and longer tenured teachers than others.

Through these recommendations, classrooms across the nation can begin to utilize teacher motivations to enhance student learning.