The purpose of this study is to understand the mathematical content proficiency middle and high school teachers have before and after their first year teaching and taking graduate coursework in the Teach for America (TFA) program, as well as what attitudes toward mathematics TFA teachers have over the first year. There was a significant increase…

Training and investing teachers at all career levels in student-centered practices is widely recognized as a significant challenge. Various studies document the failure of student-centered teaching practices to take hold in K-12 mathematics classrooms in significant ways, including collaborative work; problems that are cognitively demanding or…

In the context of higher education, the role of mentoring new staff is variously established, though often informal. It is sometimes associated with research supervision, but more recently the increasing sophistication of the roles of staff has seen the introduction of "mentoring" to manage induction. In South Africa, a strong motivation…

Over the last two decades, the notion of teacher leadership has emerged as a key concept in both the teaching and leadership literature. While researchers have not reached consensus regarding a definition, there has been some agreement that teacher leadership can operate at both a formal and informal level in schools and that it includes…

Studies suggest that low retention rates in the beginning years of teaching are a significant problem for school culture and threaten student achievement. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of factors that influence new teachers to remain in the profession and to determine whether a new teacher training academy model affected…

Background/Context: There is an extensive body of research on school and student characteristics associated with teacher career decisions that has contributed greatly to our knowledge of teacher preferences. Yet this research also has a number of limitations, including a lack of attention to the sociocultural influences on teacher careers and the…

This article presents a study of the Collaboration Centers Project (CCP), which is a pseudonym for a three-year, federally-funded program that focused on helping in-service teachers better address the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms. The CCP is important to study because of its clear intention to integrate real…

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a social studies teacher education vision statement as it relates to Parker's (2003) "advanced" conception of citizenship education for democratic society. The vision statement, titled "Powerful Vision of Social Studies," was created by a group of practicing teachers and teacher educators as part of a…

The introduction of the new teacher education model that includes competences and educator roles has marked a major change in teacher preparation programmes. The purpose of this study was to ascertain how novice educators perceive the new teacher education programme, that is, to find out whether novice educators perceive the teacher education…

This article attempts to synthesize teachers' conceptions-of-teaching and integrate them into a structure for professional development. It presents one route by which a teacher might become more expert at the practice of teaching. Various conceptions-of-teaching theories are considered in the light of how they impact on the practice of teaching.…

The purpose of this study was to develop a model for evaluating a professional development school program to enact an evidence-based model for a continuous cycle of program improvement. Guided by the logic model for program evaluation, we developed three survey instruments based on the professional development school standards of the National…

In the context of Ireland's changing demographics, this paper explores the importance of pedagogic research in informing both philosophies and pedagogical practices in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) which endeavours to facilitate student teachers' engagement with the teaching and learning process in Ireland's multicultural classrooms. By…

The purpose of this study was to provide a description of an on-site professional development program for Russian teachers as they learned to teach Sport Education. A concurrent objective was to investigate the effectiveness of this professional development opportunity. Participants were two physical education teachers (one with 27 and one with 3…

Educational researchers have recently suggested that Schon's influential model of the "reflective practitioner" lacks a prospective, or future, dimension. In this study, we examine instances of future-oriented talk produced by novice English as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers during mentoring meetings in one North American university…

The present study aimed to identify and interpret concerns of the new faculty members in Jordanian universities. A total of 336 new faculty members who participated in this study were asked to rate their perceptions of issues related to teaching, research, service, balancing work and home life and the academic culture of their workplace. Means and…