The revision of the University of Maryland Special Education Department 5-year undergraduate teacher preparation program is described. A recent program graduate's reflections on her first year of teaching illuminate key issues addressed in revising the program to focus on multicategorical special education teacher preparation across a more refined…

This study is concerned with newly qualified secondary teachers' experience of socialisation into the profession during their first year of teaching. The article argues that not only do they need to become experts in the technical aspects of teaching, they also need to develop the professional capability to establish positive relationships with…

In this paper the authors focus on one early-career teacher, co-author Natalie Gibson, whose initial teaching experiences were mediated by educational settings shaped by these different and often conflicting traditions. Their study of Natalie's early-career trajectory is concerned with understanding her effort to develop a conception of…

Few studies have explored the work of successful beginning teachers in diverse settings. This investigation follows one promising young, white elementary teacher through her student teaching in the inner city of Washington, D.C. and into her first year of teaching in a suburban, diverse Virginia school. Seven themes articulate her journey into…

In this article, we report some of the findings of a study of the perceptions of secondary teachers about their experiences as full-time second-year teachers in urban public schools. The frustrations felt by this groups of teachers emerged as a strong theme; it is the nature of these frustrations that we explore in this article.

The purpose of this study was to determine the nature of teachers' implicit in-action mental models about children's minds and learning, as inferred through the ways they teach. The work was based on the theoretical works of D. Schon, L. Shulman, and P. N. Johnson-Laird. Study participants included 24 student, novice, and experienced teachers. All…

Principals and teachers are becoming frustrated with conventional evaluation practices typically used to determine teacher effectiveness and, thus, tenure and promotion. This Digest explains that as new performance standards are being developed, there are reconfigured assessment designs requiring an array of reflective, analytic skills. Creation…

This paper describes a study of the differences between problem solving skills of graduate students in education who have had full-time teaching experience and those who have not. Information was gathered to determine the extent to which the use of concepts in problem solving and the use of problem solving strategies differ among educators as a…

The purpose of this research was to: (1) ascertain the existence and functions of practical thinking styles, illuminating teachers' thought processes; (2) identify practical thinking styles of experts (N=5) and compare them with those of novices (N=5); and (3) present several implications for rethinking teacher education in Japan. Qualitative and…

When student and novice teachers see themselves as learners or researchers and spend some of their energy trying to understand their students and their students' perspectives, they become less attached to pedagogical techniques and move quickly to a responsive and reflective way of teaching that is more commonly associated with experienced…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to ascertain whether or not prospective teachers' anxiety about teaching decreased through teacher training and the first year of teaching in accord with teacher development theory and whether or not longitudinal changes in anxiety about teaching were associated with selected academic ability and personal…

Teacher education, when viewed along a professional continuum from preservice level to beginning level to experienced level, involves a socialization phenomenon which is only minimally described or understood by the profession. Several aspects of the socialization process--career rewards, levels of professional concern, and perceptions of the…

This document presents a summary of follow-up evaluation studies of basic and advanced education graduates, conducted by the Office of Educational Research and Services at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) over the last few years. (The university's evaluative follow-up endeavors have been closely tied to a needs assessment model, and a major…

A longitudinal study of four beginning teachers examined the process of socialization during the induction period and the extent to which behavioral conformity to institutional norms reflected inner value commitments and perspectives. During their student teaching experience, the subjects participated in a study which measured their perspectives…

A study was aimed at developing a methodology for describing competent classroom teaching performance and analyzing components of competent classroom decision making to be used in improving preservice and inservice teacher training programs. Information processing research suggests that expertise in semantically rich domains involves the ability…