Effects of Job Motives, Teacher Knowledge, and School Context on Beginning Teachers’ Commitment to Stay in the Profession: A Longitudinal Study in Germany, Taiwan, and the United States

The induction period is a sensitive period in a teacher’s life. Beginning teachers have to cope with an overwhelming amount of work, applying the knowledge gained during teacher education to different and complex classroom situations with multidimensional challenges occurring at high speed. This chapter addresses the research gap by examining how teachers’ commitment to stay in the profession develops during the transition from teacher education into the job, from a comparative perspective in Germany, Taiwan, and the US A hypothetical model of how the school context may affect beginning teachers’ commitment to stay in the profession was developed based on models from occupational psychology. Job satisfaction is hypothesized to be strongly influenced by leadership quality (H2) and perceived appraisal (H3) on the one hand, and two types of perceived job burden (generic burden and subject burden) on the other hand (H4, H5; Shen, Leslie, Spybrook, and Ma, 2012; OECD, 2009; Tschannen-Moran, Hoy, and Hoy, 1998).