Beginning Teachers’ Appraisal of Professional Requirements and Implications for Teacher Induction in Switzerland

Beginning teachers are challenged by a new complexity of requirements they have to meet by entering their career as a newly graduated and fully responsible teacher. despite of experiences in pre-service teaching and the focus on combining theory and practice during teacher education in Switzerland, further professionalization is needed to master the whole complexity of demands. Based on the lazarus transactional theory of stress and coping, professional requirements are perceived individually different. developmental tasks for beginning teachers were identified, but teachers perceive and solve them in different ways. depending on individual resources of the teachers, such as knowledge, beliefs, motives and goals, personality traits, coping strategies, health and emotions, teachers experience professional requirements differently. an induction program for beginning teachers after their final graduation as a teacher must be designed according to individual teachers’ needs, allowing a flexible use of several offers, based on different didactical settings. The purpose of the article is to investigate beginning teachers’ appraisals of professional requirements. The questions are, which professional requirements are challenging, how competent teachers feel to master them and how relevant they are for them. in addition, based on the wide spread of the challenge perceptions, different types are identified and analyzed, to determine whether they differ in their appraisals of competence and relevance. The main methods used are statistical analyzes (confirmatory factor analyzes, descriptive statistics, cluster analyzes with subsequent discriminant analyzes, variance analyzes and t-test) on teachers data, collected by a questionnaire. The article shows how teachers appraise the relevance of professional requirements, how competent they feel dealing with them and how challenging they perceive the experience. in addition, different types of challenge were identified to investigate, whether they differ in their competence and in the relevance of these professional requirements. Based on the results of this study it is obvious, that teachers are challenged by requirements and that they need phase-specific opportunities to foster their further professionalization. derived from the types of perceived challenges, it is significant that such programs should be used on demand and with a focus on the concerns of the individual teacher, including metacognitive strategies. for further professionalization it is crucial that the elements of an induction program do not focus only on mastering professional requirements, but on reflection on strategies to master them in a professionalizationand health-supportive way.