Will I finish the syllabus? Concerns of novice teachers

Abstract

The term novice teacher is a topic that can be approached from two different perspectives, those that take into account the years of teaching experience and the ones that emphasize the traits that characterize these professionals. Given the changes that have occurred in education in the 21st century it is necessary to know the main problems that these teachers face. In this work, we show a quantitative research based on the descriptive method type survey carried out with a total of 50 teachers (novice and experienced) of two autonomous regions, Valencia and Catalonia in the year 2014. The aim is double, on the one hand, to know the concerns of novice teachers, and on the other, to find out whether there are differences between the perceptions provided by experienced and inexperienced teachers. In order to do this, the Problems of Teaching Inventory has been used as an instrument, performing an analysis of relative frequencies of the data obtained to respond to the first objective and the Student ‘t’ to carry out the comparative analysis of the three groups. The results indicate that novice teachers participating in this research face problems that have to do with issues related to academic and organization dimensions, apart from finding out that more teaching experience leads to less problematic situations perceived in the situations to which they were exposed. Some initiatives of collaborative work and peer learning are suggested in order to mitigate the "clash" of novice teachers with their new reality as teachers.