Dissertation Defense Announcement

The College of Education announces the Final Dissertation of

Susan Farris

for the Degree of Doctor of Education

March 28, 2018 at 10:00 AM in Room 123, Ball Hall

Advisor: Reginald Leon Green

The Investigation of the Relationships between Teacher Job Satisfaction and Retention and Green's Four-Dimensional Model of Educational Leadership

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between teachers' perceptions of their schools' implementation of Green's four-dimensional model of educational leadership, their level of satisfaction with their schools as "a good place to work and learn" and their intent to remain professionally employed there. Represented by responses to twenty items selected from the 2013 state-wide administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning survey in Tennessee (TELL Tennessee), school-level means at 248 high schools were obtained for each of four five-item scales that were intended to measure each dimension of Green's model. Along with a grand mean computed across all twenty items and denoting a school's overall implementation of the model, school-level indices were also computed for the mean level of satisfaction that the respondents expressed as well as for the percent of respondents who indicated their intention to keep working at the same school the following year. After merging these all of these data with covariates pertinent to student and faculty characteristics, five sets of two hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted to determine the effect of model implementation on each outcome. Across all ten regressions, higher scores on Green's four-dimensional model of educational leadership proved to be systematically related both to higher percentages of faculty intending to remain at the school and to higher levels of satisfaction with the school as "a good place to work and learn." While demographic variables pertinent to faculty appeared to have no relationship to either of the two outcomes, the percent of minority students at the school evidenced consistently negative associations with them both. Although the school-wide percent of students on free and reduced lunch was also systematically negatively linked to teacher satisfaction, this was not to the case for teacher retention.