In this article Penny Cataldo, a veteran early childhood mathematics teacher, describes her experience as a first time early childhood math coach. In contrast to her role as a teacher, as a math coach she was expected to lend her "expertise" to her fellow early childhood colleagues and help them develop their math practice. After…

This book is about the transition from teacher "preparation" to teaching "practice" in urban school settings. It provides a clear presentation of the challenges, resources, and opportunities for learning to teach in urban schools; examples of the experiences, perceptions, and practices of teachers who are effective in urban schools and those who…

A student's education is as good as the teacher who provides it. People are insane to put students into the care of teachers who are not cared for themselves; in doing this they drive quality teachers away from the profession, and those who stay shudder to remember those dark Novembers. In this article, the author recounts her first year of…

Young students, new to formal mathematics, come to school with various number experiences. To meet their needs, teachers must understand each student's thinking and tailor instruction appropriately. Differentiation is a vehicle for making this possible. According to Tomlinson (2001), differentiated instruction is student-centered; rooted in…

School business officials are likely to know better than anyone else about the financial costs to districts and schools associated with teacher attrition. Perhaps less well-known, though, is what else has been learned about this issue in recent years--information that may affect how one thinks about teacher turnover. Here is some of that research:…

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with…

As thousands of graduates search for new jobs each school year, networking with potential employers through social media sites can help preservice and new teachers connect with current teachers, learn about potential job openings, and engage in professional conversations. By using social media sites to follow trends in education, preservice…

Place plays an indelible role in the way people perceive and come to understand the world around them. Place influences their interactions by shaping the genres, texts, and languages they use as writers and readers. Therefore, writing that's tied to place and community encourages students to seriously consider the effects of these interactions,…

For decades, when budgets dictated teacher cutbacks, no judgment of instructional skills was required. No evaluation of student results changed the outcome. No one consulted a summative evaluation. Schools just went to the personnel file, determined hiring dates, and the last one in lost her or his chair. In the new political landscape, lawmakers…

Effective school-based induction for new teachers involves much more than mentoring; it requires a comprehensive array of supports buttressed by a collaborative professional culture. Yet few schools are able to offer such a nourishing environment to their new hires. What would it take to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal? In 2005 team…

To meet the immense challenges society faces in areas such as energy, health, and environmental protection, science teachers and teacher educators need to invest in the creation of classroom cultures that turn the intellectual heavy lifting over to the students while developing students' identities as competent learners. The vision is that…

It is always an enlightening experience to observe how ideas around change are executed. The Calgary Board of Education program for inducting new teachers into its system merited some investigation. For a period of six weeks, the authors participated in this process, with a view that, some elements of the program could be used in a similar format…

Principals play an important role in new teacher induction. The quality of the relationship with school administrators is as important to novice special education teachers as it is to novice general education teachers. Although special education teachers can benefit from general administrative support, they also may require additional supports…

If the quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers, then countries need to do all they can to build a high-quality teaching force. "Teaching Excellence through Professional Learning and Policy Reform: Lessons from around the World," the background report to the sixth International Summit on the Teaching…

A university's seminar model suggests the design of a collaborative structure that promotes team sharing and problem solving. The mentoring that occurs in the seminar comes mainly from the student teachers sharing their experiences with each other and working together to make sense of their classrooms in the context of the theories they have…