Novice teachers dealing with professional challenges during their first year of teaching. A qualitative-reconstructive research study to identify the characteristics of Luxembourgish Elementary School teacher's professional coping strategies.

To succeed, young teachers must rise and meet a range of professional challenges during their first year of teaching. The purpose of this study is to identify how novice teachers, at Luxembourg Elementary schools, deal with these challenges. This qualitative research study was designed to explore how young teachers perceive and interpret professional challenges and what behaviours they adopt to meet these situations. To analyse the coping processes of young teachers, a heuristical framework was developed, which emphasizes the dynamic relationship between personal and contextual factors and their influence on the perception and decisions of teachers. The study presents and discusses how coping with these challenges always incorporates various types of mental strategies. These findings allow for a better understanding of how young teachers make decisions, which may help direct, for example, future development of induction programmes in support of novice teachers. The main thesis of this study is that overall individual satisfaction among first-year teachers is mainly the result of their own efforts to successfully meet individual needs, such as feeling competent, self consistency, certitude, and being in harmony with personal relationships. To arrive at these insights, 21 first-year teachers were recruited via random selection from a set of volunteers. The study conducted a total of three face-to-face interviews with each of the teachers. To study the progress and changes of how young teachers address the challenges over time, the first interview was conducted before the beginning of the year, the second took place in the middle of the year, and third interview was done at the end of the first year of teaching. Using structuring content analysis methodology, the interviews suggest that personal needs strongly affect both perceptions and reactions among early career teachers over their first year of teaching. This research study provides valuable information regarding the dynamics by which novice teachers meet professional demands, such as assimilative and accommodative strategies, in order to respond to their individual needs. These findings inform and highlight the importance of induction programmes, which ought to take into account the personal, yet very common, needs of first-year teachers. Thus, the aim of induction programmes should be to combine professional development that improves the teaching quality with professional satisfaction, by taking into account, and responding to, first-year individual needs