Resource 27 October 2023

YETI Teacher Pathway Report

Jose Villagran

The YETI Project

The Erasmus+ funded project YETI (Young Entrepreneurial Teachers Initiative) aims to promote and institutionalise entrepreneurship education (EE) practices among aspiring teachers in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes.

Aim of the YETI Teacher Pathway Report

The YETI Teacher Pathway Report aims to map the educational pathway that aspiring teachers undergo when they transition from Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes to autonomous and successful teaching at school.

Encourage young people to choose teaching profession

Teachers are identified as the most important factor influencing the quality of education in schools (SEC, 2010) and having a considerable effect not only on students’ academic progress, but also on their social and behavioural well-being and, as a consequence, there has been a growing emphasis across many countries on attracting and retaining good teachers (Darmody and Smyth, 2016). For that reason, it is important to encourage young people to choose the teaching profession and to encourage newly qualified teachers to stay at schools. Many experienced teachers still remember how difficult their first teaching year/years were due to a variety of reasons.

First of all, according to Bloom (2014), all first-year teachers spend more time on doing teaching related tasks than their experienced colleagues. The tasks include not only teaching the subject matter and dealing with classroom-management issues, but also paperwork, contacts with students’ parents, supporting students with special needs and work overload in general.

Teacher support programmes

Due to all the demands and challenges described above, many teachers face self-doubt, problems with coping and disillusionment and they feel they need further guidance and support from more experienced co-workers, mentors and other people that potentially could support them. For that reason, in some countries there are novice teacher support programmes, often called induction programmes, whose aim is to support teachers who enter the profession. It is important, especially in view of the fact that novice teachers, even after completing certification programmes, are not finished “products” yet and need support (e.g. offered by induction programmes) in order to become committed professionals who stay within the profession (Bloom, 2014).