There is much alarm about the current teacher shortage resulting from the pandemic and its aftermath. But teacher shortages have long been a perennial issue in K-12 education. Researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry Tran analyzed data from the National Center of Education Statistics to compare rural schools to urban and suburban schools to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in…

Why do society and the courts so readily recognize university and college teachers' academic freedom but just as readily deny primary and secondary school teachers the same right? To investigate this question, this article considers teachers' work in light of the standard justifications for granting academic freedom in higher education: that…

Although primary teachers in the Republic of Ireland are generalist teachers, language teaching of both Irish and English, as well as the development of literacy skills across the curriculum is an integral part of their daily professional practice. This paper presents an analysis of the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL)…

Guided by the "constructivism in practice" dilemmas framework developed by Windschitl (Rev Educ Res 72(2):131-175, 2002) we investigated the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political barriers that 24 K-12 mathematics teachers working in a high-poverty urban school district in Texas encountered when trying to implement…

This paper explores a three-year Creative Professional Development programme for teachers which encourages them to develop their skills as writers and illustrators in order to bring creative and original ideas about writing and illustrating into their classroom practice. The implicit message within such a programme is that without it, teachers,…

The interest in teachers' discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers' professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman's distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab's interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in…

In 2010, Principal Kirk introduced Small Group Meeting (SGM) at Hillcrest Elementary. SGMs are multiage student groupings who meet with school faculty once a month to work on community building, service-learning projects, and advising. Many teachers liked the SGMs, some felt they needed more time to prepare, and others felt it was a waste of time.…

Taking the latest reform of Swedish teacher education as a point of departure, the aim of this article is to analyse the way Swedish teacher unions construct a knowledge base for teaching as a strategy of professionalisation. The analysis shows that the unions construct such a knowledge base from opposing points of departure. Their professional…

Current interest in teacher evaluation focuses disproportionately on measurement issues and performance-based pay without an overarching theory of how evaluation works. To develop such a theory, I contrast two motivation theories often used to guide thinking about teacher evaluation. External motivation theory relies on economics and extrinsic…

This article considers the extent to which the needs and aspirations of teachers are taken into account in three examples of current Primary and Early Years documentation--the National Curriculum, the Early Years Foundation Stage and the Primary Framework. This analysis is done through three methods: a critical discourse analysis of the aims and…

Teachers hold the key to school reform. Professional learning communities--as well as other related strategies, including collaborative and distributive models of leadership--offer much that is promising. Yet, weaknesses documented in research require attention. We conducted a study of teachers in two elementary schools identified as exemplary…

Universalization of primary education has been high on the policy agenda in India. This book looks at the reproduction of social inequalities within the educational system in India, and how this is contested in different ways. It examines whether the concept of "education for all" is just a mechanically conceived policy target to chasing…

Mathematics teaching and learning are inherently complex practices, and reports suggest that American teachers are not as successful at teaching mathematics as the authors might hope. In this article, the authors explore how a seemingly ubiquitous new technology--the personal audio/video player--just might help teachers improve mathematics…

Two normative interpretations, professionalism and democracy, are advanced for research that argues for such school reform as decentralized management, a team approach to school operation, and more autonomy for teachers. It is argued that a democratic conception is distinguishable from, and preferable to, a conception of teachers as professionals.…