| dc.description.abstract | Employee onboarding is the first opportunity an organization has to create space for individuals to acclimate to their work environment, helping them adjust to the social, operational, and performance aspects of their roles while building the individual tools necessary to contribute to larger organizational goals. In education, particularly in schools characterized as low income, onboarding is all more important due to the difficulty schools often have in recruiting high quality teachers and retaining those teachers after their first 5 years. It is important, then, for school districts to hire highly-qualified candidates and ensure that those candidates are adequately prepared to assume their new teaching positions, thus improving their chances of becoming effective educators within their new district.
Through the development of efficient processes for administrative onboarding, districts can provide opportunities for new teachers to steep in the vision, core values, and norms of the organization and engage in meaningful opportunities to practice essential skills prior to day one in the classroom. Through a lens of organizational socialization and uncertainty reduction theories, the purpose of this study was to develop, implement, and evaluate a new onboarding process in a large, urban Mid-western school district. Using mixed-methodological approach, the researcher evaluated the effects of this onboarding process with respect to three key outcomes increased novice teacher self-efficacy, increased investment in the career (intent to stay), and increased feelings of support and connection to the district office (perception of service culture). Study findings reveal that the interventions in this study failed to improve intent to stay and perception of service culture over the study period. They did, however, appear to increase novice teacher’s perception of self-efficacy over time. | en_US |
