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This essay opens with a question about what science teaching would look like in a world where categorical seams of human diversity were not probabilistic determinants of science learning. After revisiting Hewson and Hewson's description of an “appropriate conception of science teaching,” I detail the ways in which the field of science education has advanced in the decades since that article's publication. Drawing upon Cohen's notion of teaching as an “impossible profession,” I highlight how conceptions of science teaching compete with other popular models of teaching and learning science. Fenstermacher and Richardson's distinction between successful teaching, and good teaching is then presented to demonstrate that even science teaching that is considered successful and good remains embedded in a constrained system where well-regarded classroom practices may still lead to accumulated negative consequences. The essay ends with a discussion of complexity and recursiveness in science teaching, an argument for science teaching that includes embedded understandings of that teaching and learning on the part of the students themselves, and suggestions for a revised conception of science teaching. 

This paper theorizes teacher retention using the framework of job-embeddedness, and analyzes the case of a school district in New Jersey where science teachers have been retained at a much higher rate than most other school districts in the state during the focus period of the study (2007-2018). The research team interviewed 18 individuals in the district, including administrators, novice science teachers, mentor science teachers, retained science teachers, and the induction program coordinator. Other data collected included publicly available district documents, and documentation related to the mentoring and induction efforts provided by the district induction coordinator. The primary goal of the site visit was to better understand the factors that may have influenced teacher retention during the focus period of the data and to also investigate current practices around the mentoring and induction of new science teachers. Four factors were identified as salient to the high science teacher retention rate in the district: 1) collaborative and supportive colleagues in the science department, 2) the overall culture of the school, students, and community, 3) hiring and induction practices, and 4) ample resources for teaching and professional growth. 

Abstract This study uses state‐level staffing data to analyze the five‐year career trajectories of all 231 first‐year secondary science teachers in New Jersey who began teaching during the 2010‐2011 school year. The person‐position framework for studying teacher retention is introduced in this analysis, and the authors present a case for the importance of specifying both location and duration in empirical reporting on teacher retention, as well as distinguishing between the employers’ and individual teachers’ perspectives on retention. In the cohort studied here, the 5‐year retention‐by‐employer rate was 38%, but the retention‐in‐profession rate for those actively teaching was 65%. An additional 24% of science teachers changed districts during or immediately after their first year, and were retained in their second districts for four or more years. 16% of the science teachers in the cohort identified as non‐White or Hispanic and these teachers were retained at similar rates to their White/non‐Hispanic counterparts. Alternate route preparation programs attracted many more secondary science teachers who identified as non‐White or Hispanic, but teachers from these programs had a far lower 5‐year retained‐in‐profession rate (45%) than non‐White or Hispanic traditional route teachers (75%). It was more common for science teachers in higher SES districts to transfer to lower SES districts than the reverse. The position turnover rate for science teachers was slightly lower in higher SES districts. As a category, charter schools had the lowest 5‐year science teacher retention rate (13%). There was no identifiable relationship between the age, sex, subject area certification, or starting salary of science teachers and the measures of retention used in this study. The authors discuss the characterization of retention itself in research, including the use of descriptors related to retention. Implications relating to science teacher education policy are discussed, as is the future use of state‐level data systems in retention research.