Enculturating a Protective Professional Community—Processes of Teacher Retention in a Swedish Hard-to-Staff School

Abstract

This study presented a positive deviant case: a Swedish hard-to-staff school which has had a low rate of teacher turnover over time. In line with the purpose of studying positive deviance in organisations, our exploratory inquiry was geared towards understanding how and why ‘at-risk’ teachers, i.e., teachers who teach in subjects which are known to have high levels of staffing difficulties in Sweden, stayed at this particular school. Using a modified grounded theory approach, our results suggested that teachers remained at the school due to being embedded in a protective professional community that was enculturated by different expressions of collegiality. Finally, these findings are discussed in relation to the theoretical concepts of teachers’ job embeddedness and social capital.

Keywords

• teacher retention
• hard-to-staff school
• teacher turnover
• collegiality
• teacher community
• job embeddedness