Those who start. The challenge of accompanying novices teachers

Abstract

Initiation to professional practice is an essential element in defining, among other things, the educational practices of teachers. Novice teachers must be accompanied, systematically, to serve as a link between their pre-service training and their autonomous professional career. The aim of this paper is to study the perceptions that Compulsory Education Spanish teachers have about their own initiation to teaching, as well as their perception of how this process of insertion into the professional practice should be. The research followed an ex post facto design. An ad hoc questionnaire has been designed with a robust validation in four phases, with a sample of 1148 teachers. The analyses include both descriptive and inferential statistics. The data show teachers' agreement, on the one hand, with the need to put in place mechanisms to accompany teachers in their first years of teaching, and, on the other hand, a negative trend in their perception of how their initiation to teaching was. This negative evaluation is not in those teachers who have undergone the initiation process, since they show greater satisfaction with their professional insertion. Based on the results, the need to implement and improve the accompaniment of new teachers in Spain is evident and the current situation is favorable because of the great consensus that has existed for years among teachers, the educational community and even political parties.