RISE Online Presentation Series: Teachers and the Teaching Profession II: Motivation and Overcoming Constraints
In the absence of the RISE Annual Conference, this summer’s Online Presentation Series continued the RISE tradition of gathering emerging scholarship that considers the learning crisis from an education systems perspective. Each author presented their paper in a pre-recorded video that will be available via the RISE YouTube channel (and RISE website).
This panel explored the factors at play in attracting, retaining, and motivating good teachers. It featured two papers that explore the broad set of career structures that jointly determine teacher behavior, and two papers that shed new light on the level and importance of teacher pay.
RISE Research Fellow Yue-Yi Hwa presented a holistic model of teacher careers wherein pay is only one of a number of relevant factors, and where those factors vary across phases of the teacher career cycle (pre-service, novice, experience, and veteran). Shintia Revina from the RISE Indonesia team drew on ‘thick’ qualitative data from 16 novice teachers in Indonesia to highlight how non-pay factors – such as workload, and the prevailing norms modeled by experienced teachers – affected their motivation.
Christina Brown from the RISE Pakistan team described a randomized controlled trial in private schools in Pakistan that illuminates the conditions under which performance pay can raise teacher quality and in particular the impact of performance pay on the understudied margin of how teachers sort into schools.
Finally, David Evans used rarely assembled descriptive statistics from 15 African countries to ask whether teachers are underpaid relative to similar workers (yes overall, but not per hour) and to identify a robust correlation between teacher pay and student learning outcomes that also emphasizes the potential role of pay in teacher selection.