The Challenges of Beginning Teachers Experience In The Early Years of Teaching

Abstract

The early years of the teaching profession is a period in which the teachers both begin teaching and learn how to teach and an important career step that affects their way of teaching. In this context, there are plenty of qualitative and quantitative studies conducted in different countries in the international literature on the challenges encountered in the teaching profession's early years. This research is a meta-synthesis study that synthesizes the research results discussing the challenges encountered by newly appointed teachers. Fourteen studies conducted in 11 different countries were included in the meta-synthesis. Six themes were first identified as a result of the analyzes: these are official policies and school practices, social relations, teaching practices, support, individual factors, and school-environment adaptation. In the next step, a second-level of abstraction was performed to set forth the syntheses. These are as follows: 1) mismatch between theory and practice, 2) schoolenvironment context and 3) interaction between individual factors and contextual conditions. While the themes obtained in the research express the problem areas, the syntheses shed light on the problems' sources. Within the framework of the determining themes and syntheses, suggestions have consequently been made about the policies and practices to be developed for the challenges that the teachers may encounter in the early years of the profession.