Three CSUS researchers win “Award of Distinction” at 2025 North Central American Association for Agricultural Education
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EmailAaron McKim, Jessica Toombs, and Caitlin Goodwin received award for their research on agricultural teacher retention.
Three members of the Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources Education (AFNRE) team received an “Award of Distinction” for their research at the 2025 North Central American Association for Agricultural Education (NC-AAAE) research conference this week. Aaron McKim, Associate Professor, Jessica Toombs, Assistant Professor, and Caitlin Goodwin, PhD student- all scholars within the Department of Community Sustainability- awarded work is entitled “Practical Extensions to the Donut Model for Agriculture Teacher Success.” Theirs was one of only five chosen across all abstracts submitted to the conference as evaluated by peer scholars in the field.
In this work, McKim, Toombs, and Goodwin explored some of the reasons why agricultural teachers leave their jobs. The team notes that while many studies point to increasing work responsibilities as the reason why teachers leave, that alone may not adequately capture the full picture. In this work, McKim, Toombs, and Goodwin argues that a more complex model is needed to understand the relationship between work responsibilities and teacher retention.
To create a more nuanced model of responsibility and retention, McKim says “Our work adds that complexity by offering a framework with four categories of work responsibilities experienced by teachers- positive realized, negative avoided, negative realized, and positive avoided. We explore how additional or fewer responsibilities within these four categories may contribute to teachers leaving.”
This work on teacher retention has implications for the state, as Michigan is struggling to recruit and retain teachers. The research from McKim, Toombs, and Goodwin is already being implemented within the AFNRE graduate program that prepares agricultural and natural resource educators. Teachers within a graduate-level course for new teachers (CSUS 864) are engaging in weekly reflections around their work responsibilities using this new framework. “Our team is eager to evaluate how interacting with this new framework (a) empowers these teachers to better manage their workloads and (b) relates to their retention,” says McKim. Connecting advances in research to teacher preparation can help address the real-world challenges faced by educators and improve teacher retention across Michigan.
Manuscript citation (full text available at hyperlink below):
McKim, Toombs, & Goodwin – “Practical Extensions to the Donut Model for Agriculture Teacher Success”
