Conclusion

Educators, policy makers, and researchers are well aware of the issues facing schools as a result of teacher turnover (NCTAF, 2007). However, effective strategies for dealing with the problem have largely eluded these groups. While profes- sional development and mentoring, approaches recommended by the National Academy of Education (NAEd, 2009) will likely help educators feel more equipped for the struggles they encounter in the classroom and more invested in their ca- reers, our results suggest other tactics that might be valuable. Given that the issues cited by teachers themselves relate to a sense of alienation and isolation, and the results here suggest the importance of interdependence and interaction in teach- ers’ commitment, more should be done to enhance interaction among teachers. Specifically, schools could ensure that teach- ers have power in a way that increases interaction and interdependence, like the school-level decisions that we include in our model (e.g., setting performance standards for students at this school, establishing curriculum, determining the content of in-service professional development programs, evaluating teachers, hiring new full-time teachers, setting discipline pol- icies, and deciding how the school budget will be spent). Engaging in this type of interaction should naturally increase po- sitive affect and cohesion, leading to both staying and professional investment, therefore reducing teacher turnover. Of course, such practices should not be seen as a panacea. The research presented here has a number of limitations. First, life outside the laboratory is a bit messier than what experiments show. Although the endogenous process of the affect the- ory is nested in our model, we see many more direct effects between variables that demonstrate a complex array of influ- ences teacher commitment. In addition, we did not always have access to measures that fit the affect theory’s concepts as well as we would have liked. This could contribute to the extraneous relationships in the model and threaten our ability to directly test the theory using this data. Future research should work to find a data set with measures that are a better fit to the concepts central to the theory. Second, these are only cross-sectional data. It would be ideal to test these processes over several time points in order to test the causal nature of the theoretical assumptions. SASS data is a longitudinal survey con- ducted every 4 years, but it does not use a panel sample of teachers. Moreover, the question wording for the survey that fol- lowed the 2004 data we used changed the answer categories of commitment by omitting the ‘‘neutral’’ middle option and so the differences would not be comparable. We also only tested teachers in elementary school settings. With settings varying greatly between elementary and secondary school, these findings might not translate cleanly to more advanced school set- tings. Despite these limitations, we hope that future research in education considers the affect theory and its mechanisms as it explores effective strategies to reduce teacher turnover or enhance other important outcomes. Realizing the mutuality of the relationship between the laboratory and the ‘‘real’’ world, we also argue that there is in- sight here for future research in the affect theory and the related relational cohesion theory. While Lawler and Yoon (1996) found no gender effects in early RCT research, discussion of gender has been notably absent in related research since then.10 Given our finding that gender plays a dominant role in the commitment-generating process, it is worth considering gender more pointedly in future experimental research. With the basis of the theory centering on affect and relations, it could be that women are more susceptible to the central mechanisms of the theories. This could be exacerbated in a women-dominated context like elementary education, where most of the interactions and relationships are with teachers of the same sex (Maccoby, 2002; Reis et al., 1985). It is important for future research on micro-social orders to consider more pointedly both gender and organiza- tional context. We began this article by describing the problem of teacher turnover and the dynamic relationship between experimental social psychology and life outside the laboratory. To forge connections between the two we explored the relevance of Law- ler’s affect theory (2001) to a significant problem in education, teacher turnover. Our results not only suggest that great in- sight can emerge from experimental social psychology, but also that relatively simply school-level policies and norms may hold great promise for enhancing teacher retention.