The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) and the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA) recently released the 2023 results of the Tennessee Educator Survey. Several new questions were posed related to early career educators. These questions were aimed at developing a better understanding of the extent to which educator preparation programs are perceived as beneficial by early career educators.
One of the questions asks “Which of the following best describes your path to becoming a teacher?”
- I have wanted to be a teacher since I was young (before high school).
- I started thinking about becoming a teacher while in high school.
- I decided to enter an educator preparation program after starting college.
- I enrolled in a teaching cert program after receiving a degree in another field.
- I previously worked in another field; teaching was a career change for me.
Overall, statewide results indicate that there is a nearly equal percentage of educators who decided on becoming teachers pre high school (29%) as there are teachers who change careers and enter the profession later in life (27%). This helpful finding indicates that programs like Grow Your Own, teacher residences, job-embedded programs, teacher apprenticeships, and other pathways that are designed to serve adult learners are meeting a significant need. It will be interesting to see how this and other data reported through the survey shift as more low-cost, high quality pathways for adult learners become available around the state in the years to come.
