Despite the importance of understanding teacher empowerment and silence to help address issues of teacher shortage and well-being and improve school-based consultation, research on the topic has been understudied and undertheorized, particularly for new teachers. To fill this research gap, we carried out a constructivist grounded theory-based qualitative exploration of factors that contribute to new teachers' empowerment and silence during the COVID-19 pandemic among a sample of 24 first-year new teachers from a large and diverse urban school district in northern California. The findings identified different sets of psychological and social-structural factors contributing to new teachers' empowerment and silence, respectively. Factors contributing to empowerment included autonomy and a sense of accomplishment in the psychological domain and support, appreciation or being acknowledged, and shared beliefs in the social-structural domain. Factors contributing to silence included a lack of self-efficacy in the psychological domain and being limited in the decision-making process, a lack of connected and safe space, and a lack of knowledge of unwritten school norms and procedures in the social--structural domain. Findings suggest that empowerment and silence might be dual-factor constructs driven by different sets of factors that do not fully mirror each other. Findings provided important theoretical and practical implications for creating psychological and social-structural supports to promote new teachers' well-being, increasing school psychologists' effectiveness in providing consultation services with new teachers as their consultees, and creating safe and connected spaces for sharing voices among new teachers with diverse backgrounds.