Empowerment and Silence: A Grounded Theory Exploration Among New Teachers

Despite the importance of understanding teacher empowerment and silence to help address issues of teacher shortage and well-being and improve school-based consultation, research on the topic has been understudied and undertheorized, particularly for new teachers. To fill this research gap, we carried out a constructivist grounded theory-based qualitative exploration of factors that contribute to new teachers' empowerment and silence during the COVID-19 pandemic among a sample of 24 first-year new teachers from a large and diverse urban school district in northern California. The findings identified different sets of psychological and social-structural factors contributing to new teachers' empowerment and silence, respectively. Factors contributing to empowerment included autonomy and a sense of accomplishment in the psychological domain and support, appreciation or being acknowledged, and shared beliefs in the social-structural domain. Factors contributing to silence included a lack of self-efficacy in the psychological domain and being limited in the decision-making process, a lack of connected and safe space, and a lack of knowledge of unwritten school norms and procedures in the social-structural domain. Findings suggest that empowerment and silence might be dual-factor constructs driven by different sets of factors that do not fully mirror each other. Findings provided important theoretical and practical implications for creating psychological and social-structural supports to promote new teachers' well-being, increasing school psychologists' effectiveness in providing consultation services with new teachers as their consultees, and creating safe and connected spaces for sharing voices among new teachers with diverse backgrounds.

Automated summary

This study investigated the factors contributing to new teachers' empowerment and silence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and found that psychological and social-structural factors played different roles in promoting or inhibiting empowerment and silence among new teachers.