Why Teachers Remain Teaching in Rural Districts: Listening to the Voices from the Field

Preservice and novice teachers face a number of stress factors, including concerns about students, cooperating teachers and families, content knowledge, effective teaching practices, workload, and time management (Rieg et al., 2007). Teachers in rural settings also face common challenges, such as limited access to resources, isolation, unexpected changes, interactions with colleagues and administrators, social problems within communities, learning about and being accepted by communities, differing values between educators and community members, heavy workload, balancing and overlap between personal and professional lives, and concerns with student attendance, involvement and curriculum (Adams & Woods, 2015; Hellsten et al., 2018) Reasons for Continuing to Teach in Rural Areas Despite the challenges faced by teachers in rural schools, factors related to teacher efficacy support teachers' responses to stressors and improve teacher retention (Adams & Woods, 2015). A mixedmethods study of midcareer teachers in predominantly rural, remote Alaskan K-12 schools who had participated in a mentoring program early in their careers found that being prepared with realistic expectations and relevant experiences, community and colleague relationships, professionalism, including collaboration, tapping outside resources and creativity in teaching, and being student-focused, including prioritizing student-teacher relationships and adapting instruction to meet student needs, supported teachers' sense of efficacy and thus, retention (Adams & Woods, 2015). REDCap is a secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies, providing: 1) an intuitive interface for validated data entry; 2) audit trails for tracking data manipulation and export procedures; 3) automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages; and 4) procedures for importing data from external sources.