Abstract:
As a longitudinal study, the Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) project is gathering evidence about how practice-based interventions might improve early career teachers’ retention and perceptions of teaching quality. This paper specifically reports on the latent structural modelling that determined the relationship between three key variables measured by the project: a desire to practice, perceptions of teaching quality and teaching as a career. The model was derived using a sub-sample of 340 TAP participants who are primarily employed as teachers, with most of the sample comprising of visual arts teachers. The best fitting model showed the TAP intervention, a discipline-based practice-focused intervention, is a mediating factor on perceptions of teacher quality and teaching as a career. The model begins to build empirical evidence that maintaining discipline practice after initial teacher education supports early career teacher quality.