Professor Van Ry

K-12 teachers in the U.S. tend to become less engaged at work after their first year, according to a just-released Gallup poll. For educators with between six months and a year of teaching, professional engagement is at 35.1 percent. But that figure goes down to 30.9 percent for teachers who have been on the job for one to three years, and it continues to drop for teachers in their third to fifth year. At more than 10 years, there’s a slight bump back upwards, bringing engagement to 31.8 percent.

The Gallup poll categorizes people in three ways: engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged. Gallup defines engaged workers as those who are “deeply involved in and enthusiastic about their work and actively contributing to their organization” and not engaged workers as “satisfied with their workplaces, but … not emotionally connected to them.”

The results (below) are based on phone interviews conducted with a random sample of 151,284 adults, including 7,265 K-12 teachers, between January and December 2012. <Read more.>

Via Liana Heitin, Education Week.