Why Do You Want to Be a Teacher? A Natural Language Processing Approach

Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive article examines preservice teachers’ expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career. Using data from a large teacher education program in Texas, we use a natural language processing algorithm to categorize into topical groups roughly 2,800 essay responses to the prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We identify 10 topics that largely reflect altruistic and intrinsic (although not extrinsic) reasons for teaching. The frequency of topics varied substantially by preservice teacher gender, race/ethnicity, and certification area. Intrinsic enjoyment of teaching and experiences with adversity predicted higher clinical teaching performance and lower attrition as a full-time teacher.