This project combines qualitative and quantitative data to provide a comprehensive examination of mentoring practice in an attempt to understand the ways in which mentoring leads to positive outcomes for beginning teachers and their students in AISD during 2010-2011.

Guided by new structuralism theory, this study examined the context of novice teacher socialization, identified the frequency and substance of interactions between novice teachers and their mentors and other colleagues, and reported on novices' evaluation of the support that they received. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with…

We compare beginning special and general education teachers' access to school-based colleagues. Our findings demonstrate that colleague relationships are critical for the experiences of beginning teachers, as are the school organizational norms that these beginning teachers experience. For special education teachers in particular, perception of…

In this article we report the outcomes of a needs assessment administered to new faculty members who were hired within the last four years at Mount Royal University. Our purpose in conducting this needs assessment was to gather information to guide the redevelopment of the institution's support program for new faculty in light of a changing…

For 40 years, the "staff teaching seminar" has aimed to prepare academics to meet the complex demands of university teaching. In Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ), as elsewhere, the seminar emerged in the late 1960s-early 1970s, and preceded centrally funded academic development (AD) centres. Targeting new academics, the programme typically…

This report provides a longitudinal overview of the AISD REACH mentoring program and its relationship to beginning teacher effectiveness and retention.

This paper identifies challenges that English as a foreign language (EFL) novice teachers in Indonesia may face in developing a professional identity, which, in this paper, refers to becoming a practitioner of cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is a mandated teaching method both in the 2006 and 2013 Indonesian curriculum, and is under the…

In this article we investigate the generative causes of variation in the professional identity of new teachers. Building on previous work that has shown a link between professional identity and socio-political context, we argue that the context experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood is particularly significant in shaping how beginning…

Having completed a degree in theology and philosophy, Robert Jackson writes that he really did not know which career he wanted to pursue. He eventually opted to do a one-year postgraduate teacher training course, but was not sure that he wanted to be a teacher or that he would be effective in that role. The moment of truth was being sent into…

The edTPA, a performance assessment designed to generate reliable and valid measures of teaching practice, increasingly is used as a gatekeeping mechanism for beginning teacher licensure in various states, including New York, Washington State, Wisconsin, and Georgia. One of the edTPA's key components is the demonstration of instructional practice…

In this paper we explore newly qualified New Zealand secondary teachers' varied accounts of induction. We claim that multiple interpretations of objectives for induction programs are a significant source of this variation. With reference to an activity system framework, we identify four primary "objects" of induction that were…

The Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) 4 program represents a programmatic shift away from educator compensation reform as the primary lever of change for teacher performance and student learning. The TIF 4 program is designed to encourage the use of educator effectiveness measures to support the strategic instructional vision…

This report offers an insider's perspective into the world-leading Shanghai education system. After more than 40 years of reconstruction and reform, education in Shanghai has achieved remarkable results. In the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) 2009 and 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA),…

This article explores the paradoxical situation of early career teachers in this era of standards-based reforms, beginning with the experiences of an English teacher working in a state school in Queensland, Australia and expanding to consider the viewpoints of her colleagues. Our goal is to trace the ways she and the other early career teachers at…

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century,…