Background/Context: A fundamental tension has long existed between school reform proposals and actual teaching practice. Despite a large literature on teacher change, the discontinuity between innovation and practice continues and many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of…

Context: The documentary film about U.S. education reform, "Waiting for 'Superman'," was met with acclaim and controversy when released to theaters in 2010, and again when launching its grassroots "host a screening" campaign in 2011. The campaign ran concurrent with 2011 state legislative sessions, during which several states…

Background: Teacher quality plays a key role in student learning outcomes. Yet, data suggest that elite college graduates who enter teaching are less likely to stay in schools serving low income and minority students compared to other teachers. Thus, many educators and policy makers agree that in order to equalize the playing field, recruitment,…

Background: High rates of teacher turnover likely mean greater school instability, disruption of curricular cohesiveness, and a continual need to hire inexperienced teachers, who typically are less effective, as replacements for teachers who leave. Unfortunately, research consistently finds that teachers who work in schools with large numbers of…

Background/Context: Our article develops insights from Paul Woodruff's book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2001), to discuss reverence in teaching. We show how reverence is both a cardinal and a forgotten virtue by situating it within the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics, which involves traits of…

Background/Context: Similar to the United States, government efforts to improve education in the Netherlands are focused on innovation and the development of collaborative structures to support the generation of new knowledge. However, empirical evidence of the relationship between social linkages and innovation in education is scarce. Objective:…

Background/Context: Teachers affect student performance through their interaction with students in the context of the classrooms and schools where teaching and learning take place. Although it is widely assumed that supportive working conditions improve the quality of instruction and teachers' willingness to remain in a school, little is known…

Background/Context: Educational policy makers have begun to recognize the challenges posed by teacher turnover. Schools and students pay a price when new teachers leave the profession after only 2 or 3 years, just when they have acquired valuable teaching experience. Persistent turnover also disrupts efforts to build a strong organizational…

Background: The need to support new teachers in urban public schools is well established, given current shortages and research that highlights serious issues with teacher retention. Debate continues about approaches to support for new teachers, including questions about the importance of developing an inquiry stance toward teaching. As more…

Background/Context: Studies have found that within-field mentoring, collaboration with colleagues, and administrative support can increase new general education teacher commitment (Kapadia, Coca, & Easton, 2007; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). In the area of special education, studies have reported that support from mentors and colleagues is…

Background/Context: For over two decades, the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities have become blurred, and numerous articles and books have been written about the infusion of the arts in qualitative research as a means to collect and analyze data and to represent findings. Yet these arts-based research processes, although…

Background/Context: Increasingly, instructional reforms in US schools place teachers in differentiated roles, such as literacy coach or data analyst. Not only do these roles hold promise for reforming instruction, but they also may make the teaching career more rewarding by offering teachers new challenges over time. In the past, teachers who held…

Background/Context: This study draws on the voluminous research on teachers' workplace orientations and especially on Dan Lortie's documentation of conservatism, individualism, and presentism among teachers. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study investigated a school reform network of over 300 secondary schools entitled…

Background/Context: In response to state-level test-based accountability and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school administrators increasingly view centralized curriculum and prescribed instructional strategies as the most direct means of increasing student performance. This movement toward standardization reduces teachers' autonomy and…

Background/Context: Studies of new teacher induction have typically examined the structural components of mentoring programs or documented the nature of support provided to beginning teachers. More recently, Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues examined new teachers' induction experiences across multiple states and preparation routes. In…