Teacher self-efficacy is critical because it predicts teachers' future behavior and impacts teacher turnover. Most teachers begin their career with moderate to high self-efficacy for teaching, but often experience a sharp decline during the first year of teaching. After the first year, their self-efficacy begins to increase but rarely rises to the…

What is the significance of closure in mentoring relationships? This small-scale study explores mentors' reflections on coming to closure in preparing to end long-term mentoring relationships. It was conducted during the final term of mentoring on a three-year accredited national programme aimed at supporting the learning and development of early…

Drawing on our experiences as teacher educators in two programs designed specifically to prepare teachers for particular contexts, this article illustrates how we design our courses to help new teachers link foundational understandings to specific teaching practices in particular school and classroom contexts. We describe our integrated approach,…

Prior research has shown that about 15% of teachers are hired into the same school in which they student taught, about 40% are hired into their student teaching district, and the location of teachers' student teaching placements is more predictive of where they are hired than where they went to high school or college. While this suggests that…

Research often references years of experience specific to participants, yet no compiled report exists for secondary school-based agricultural education (SBAE) to holistically quantify years of teaching experience. In addition, definitions accounting for experience fall short of capturing the myriad ways experience counts in the broader teaching…

Students with different language backgrounds may cause certain challenges to some teachers. The purpose of this article is to analyze the problems some teachers may face while teaching the English language at First-grade elementary-high schools in Iran. The impact of this challenge was surveyed by means of a questionnaire to 171 students. The…

This article explores the development of teaching identity among Teach for America (TFA) corps members through the use of storied experience. Grounded in a conceptual framework of intersectional identities, specifically Gee's notions of "institution-identity" and "affinity-identity," we consider the storied experiences of two…

Established in 1992, Ofsted is championed by government ministers as the guardian of educational standards in schools and colleges. Ofsted has never produced any research on the validity of its inspection judgements. Ofsted has no evidence, other than rising percentages of schools being awarded positive Ofsted grades, to support its assertion that…

This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure the quality of classroom practice for a large-scale study of elementary teachers' mathematics instruction. Specifically, this paper shares our process for obtaining valid data for quality of elementary mathematics instruction; what we learned can inform…

The purpose of this study was to examine how graduates from three teacher education programs made decisions regarding literacy instruction and assessment as well as the extent to which they were able to implement practices learned in their education programs. Participants were interviewed and observed multiple times, and a variety of documents,…

School librarians occupy a unique position to offer supports for first-year teachers to build teachers' resilience, reduce their burnout, and ensure retention. Fifteen school librarians recruited twenty-six new teachers in their schools to form the treatment group. A comparison group of twenty-six new teachers were matched by initial scores on a…

Although technology is a vital part of 21st-century education, teachers in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts face challenges when using digital tools in their teaching. Studies have been conducted with in-service teachers to understand their beliefs and practices with digital learning of English. However, there is a gap in the…

Children who speak with nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialects represent a growing population in the U.S. public school system. This article provides recommendations for how teacher educators can support novice teachers in addressing the needs of NMAE speakers with or at risk for learning disabilities. This article focuses on four core…

Exhaustion, as a key facet of burnout, is one of the most common risks that compromises teacher well-being and contributes to a shortage of teachers. While the school social environment has been identified as an influential context for teacher exhaustion, the relative importance of its different facets remains unclear. This study focused on the…

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of beginning teacher self-efficacy when working with English language learners (ELLs) in mainstream elementary classrooms. Elementary teachers provide instruction for their students during the majority of the instructional day, and supporting students learning a new language while…