The research questions pursued in this article are: What do novice teachers perceive as their main classroom challenges and how do these challenges correspond to the formation of self-efficacy and the risks of 'compassion fatigue'?

In Denmark, to become an upper secondary school teacher, you are required to poses a university master’s degree in at best two relevant disciplines, supplemented by a Diploma in education. To obtain the diploma, the novice teacher candidates must complete a postgraduate teacher education program, where they alternate between everyday teaching practice and follow respectively general pedagogical as well as subject specific pedagogical courses. Further, they are offered sparring, and guidance from a more experienced colleague including reciprocal teaching observation. It is not possible to start this the program, without a contract of employment as a permanent teacher tenure in an upper secondary school (Qvortrup and Rasmussen, 2022). 

Though novices often enter their first teacher position excited, enthusiastic and full of energy, being a novice teacher is recognized as a challenging affair (Farrell, 2016). Novice teachers’ struggle, and it is far from everyone who makes it from novice to experienced teacher. Teacher retention is recognized as a challenge and many new teachers are considering whether to stay in the profession or give up. In previous studies, the challenges are linked to the fact that novice teachers often from day one, and unlike in many other professions, face the same responsibilities as more experienced colleagues. For many novice teachers, the initial infatuation is replaced with exhaustion, sense of powerlessness and frustration. For some, this induces somewhat of a ‘shock’ (Corcoran, 1981) or results in attrition or even retention from the teacher profession (Amitai and Van Houtte, 2022). Farrell (2016) even suggests that only the most determined can survive their first years.

A recent survey-study found teachers perceived self-efficacy in relation to their pedagogical practice to only correlate significantly to one factor: teaching experience (Cirocki, Ito, Soden and Noret, 2024). Besides the lack of teaching experience, another explanation for novices whose experiences of mastering teaching are absent or delayed and with no professional role models to lean in to, is to develop a lack of self-efficacy.  But self-efficacy, does not indicate, which aspects novice teachers lack mastering experiences in relation to. Is it a question of pedagogical content knowledge, subject specific content knowledge, knowledge on students' learning processes, didactic methods, hybrids thereof or something completely different?

Further several research on teacher candidates indicate, that novice teacher pay great attention to their students as individual persons (Rasmussen, Agergaard and Hansen, 2024) and empirical data in the current study indicates that it is relevant to introduce the concept ‘Compassion fatigue’, when it comes to describing the novice teachers’ emotional challenges when it comes to supporting students “who experience traumatic stress and suffering” (Asquith, 2022) or are in difficult life situations. 

A mixed methods design (Brymann, 2006) including both survey- and interview data was conducted. A was survey was designed and distributed to n=409 teacher candidates. 388 responses were received. This equals a 95% response rate. The survey included questions on the candidates’ experiences on classroom teaching, their teaching ideals and ambitions. Further there was questions on their perception of the teacher education program they are following (theoretical as well as practicum parts). Survey-data was analyzed through a cluster analysis to exploratively divide the novice teachers into groups based on similarities and differences between their answers to various questions. Furthermore, a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis is performed using Ward's linkage (Ward, 1963). 12 of the teacher candidates were invited for individual interviews. Here the candidates were asked to describe what they see as the core of their teaching obligation, their main interests, and challenges within the classroom. The qualitative analysis of the interview data was conducted collectively by the two authors through an abductive (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2013) alternation between the empirical material, insights from the quantitative data analyses and the theoretical concepts (novice teacher, self-efficacy and compassion fatigue).

The quantitative analysis shows that it is relevant to point to three clusters of novice in-service teacher candidates, where the teacher candidates in cluster 1 score high on factors related to the desire to develop their teaching but low on factors related to their passion for the core task of teaching. The teachers in cluster two – the absolute largest cluster with N=261 teachers, score like cluster 1, high on the desire to develop their teaching and high on passion for the core task of teaching. Finally, teachers in cluster three score medium on both their desire to develop their teaching and on passion for the core task. The interview data shows that although the 12 novice in-service teacher candidates are passionate about their subject, show great interest in their students and are positive about developing as a teacher, they have very different expectations and immediate experiences with teaching. They all perceive a busy, meaningful and responsible teaching life. Several show great enthusiasm and have already developed high self-efficacy, and conversely, there are also several who experience low self-efficacy. A few seem to be affected by compassion fatigue.

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