Exploring novice teacher responses to the challenges they encounter through guided reflective inquiry

Teachers encounter numerous challenges within their first years of teaching. More support needs to be provided to assist novice teachers with navigating challenges that have been persistent in the literature on novice teachers. This study considered how engaging in guided reflective inquiry could support novice teachers' abilities to notice and respond to the challenges they encounter. In particular, this study explored the different identities from which novice teachers can draw inspiration to understand how they may support or constrain the process of responding to challenges. Participating in guided reflective inquiry encouraged novice teachers to explore their responses to individual "wobble moments" (Fecho, 2011) and view those uncertainties as moments of growth. The theories of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981) and dialogical self theory (Hermans and Hermans-Konopka, 2010) provided a lens through which meanings were created from the generated data. This study focused on six novice teachers within their first three years of full-time teaching and implemented elements of transactional analysis (Stewart, 2011) to analyze the narratives, memos, reflections, and interview discussions generated from the participant and researcher. The ways in which novice teachers noticed the challenges they encountered, used the concept of wobble to engage in dialogue with those challenges, and considered how the exploration of one's identity supported or constrained that process were examined in this study. Three generated understandings indexed the importance of enacting approaches to teacher induction that better support novice teachers: (1) challenges encountered by the participants aligned with persistent struggles that have been well-documented in the literature on teacher challenges, (2) participant responses to wobble moments involved a two-step process of an initial reaction and a decided-upon action, and (3) participant developing teacher identities were influenced by numerous aspects of their dialogical self. The implications of this study point to the need to enact approaches to teacher induction that use guided reflective inquiry as an adaptable structure to support novice teachers' abilities to bring their identities into dialogue with the tensions from challenges they experience in their individual teaching contexts. Doctor of Philosophy The purpose of this study was to examine ways in which novice teachers can be better supported through the challenges that are often within the first years of teaching. This study employed the theoretical frameworks of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981) and dialogical self theory (Hermans and Hermans-Konopka, 2010) to consider how engaging in guided reflective inquiry could support a novice teacher's abilities to notice and respond to the challenges encountered. An in-depth exploration of the novice teacher's identity supported the process of examining influences on their responses to challenges. Six teachers participated in this study after meeting the criteria of being employed as an English or Language Arts teacher, teaching students within secondary 6th-12th grades, and being within their first three years of full-time teaching. The study involved three stages: an intake interview, three rounds per participant of submitting a wobble narrative and then discussing the wobble moment via Zoom, and a final reflection and interview. Transactional analysis (Stewart, 2011) assisted in the process of coding and analyzing the data to develop three generated understandings: (1) challenges encountered by the participants aligned with persistent struggles that have been well-documented in the literature on teacher challenges, (2) participant responses to wobble moments involved a two-step process of an initial reaction and a decided-upon action, and (3) participant developing teacher identities were influenced by numerous aspects of their dialogical selves. The implications of the understandings promote the necessity for teacher induction to implement guided reflective inquiry as a way to better support novice teachers through the challenges they encounter.