Everything has its opposite, teaches Heraclitus. From there, explaining new teachers' abandonment implies to study early perseverance in the teaching profession. The keys of their retention reside into the light both of these mirrors of a same reality reflects one on another. To apprehend the questions it raises in the field of professional insertion, this doctoral dissertation anchors on a multi-referenced theoretical framework between Psychology and Education Science. Concepts of commitment to teaching, self-efficacy and subjective well-being draw its contours. The methodology of this research is based on quantitative (N=462) and qualitative (N=15) methods at the service of four complementary studies. These studies aim to answer a complex, but crucial, question for the teaching profession: "Why teachers persevere or leave teaching in the beginning of their career?" More specifically, this question is studied in the context of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels (French community of Belgium), towards teachers who graduated from Higher Schools (3 years of training). The main results of this research are to follow. First, before actual entrance into the teaching profession, graduate teachers from Higher Schools are relatively heterogeneous in terms of intention to persist in teaching and commitment to teaching. Second, commitment to teaching is a psychological and emotional attachment to the teaching profession before being a concrete commitment in teaching activities. Third, new teachers' expectations towards the teaching profession as a job are multidimensional and play a role in their perseverance or the abandonment of the career. Fourth, their subjective well-being also seems to be an important variable in the equation of retention. Finally, the proportion of teachers from Higher Schools leaving the teaching profession two years after graduation is actually less alarming than one can believe...
