The language of leadership includes the ability to communicate effectively, a teacher's curricular goals and innovative practices, to a school district's administration, personnel, colleagues, students, parents, school board members, and other community constituents. This article focuses on explicitly teaching the language of leadership to novice…

It's lunchtime, and the author is sitting with Abigail, who is the English department chair, and several other teachers in her department during a heated discussion about the latest school mandate: a planning calendar audit. At East High School, a diverse high school on the outskirts of a large metropolitan city in the southeastern United States,…

The authors argue that to help beginning teachers improve their practice, they (as teacher educators) must acknowledge their ongoing development toward becoming professional educators in the school communities they inhabit and with the students they serve. This piece cites numerous examples of teachers reflecting over a two-year period on their…

This article highlights how considering questions of cultural positionality, especially from the perspectives of career teachers, can help support communities of teachers still in the developmental stages of their practice. In doing so, the authors: (1) challenge preexisting stereotypes of "master" and "novice" teachers; (2)…

In this article, a veteran teacher expresses the importance of drawing on the life-texts of students and recognizing the ways that personal experience influences a student's perception of the world.

Visible teaching invites educators to bring activist and change-agent identities directly into their teaching, working collaboratively with a community to enact sustainable, albeit constantly transforming, societal change. This article uses data from a year-long ethnographic study to paint a portrait of one Chicana veteran teacher who enacts an…

If the author was to pinpoint her greatest passion as an educator, it would be that of mentoring teachers. Everyone knows the statistics of how many new teachers leave the profession after just a few years and that one of the factors in retaining them lies in the value of a quality mentor. Looking back, the author realizes that educators' first…

Rachel Malchow Lloyd describes the wonderful and quite natural potential for a team of teachers, through their professional conversations and routine planning, to model for less experienced teachers how to prepare for instruction, how to assess its effect, and how to assume a professional stance consistently in the daily execution of…

This article provides readers with five lessons the author has learned over the years as a mentor teacher to several preservice teachers: (1) Build confidence; (2) Be patient, flexible, and honest; (3) Listen and learn; (4) Be ready for extra work; and (5) Embrace the experience. Included in her reflective thoughts are comments from two of her…

When given the opportunity to work with mentor programs in schools, this author has recommended a global prescription for mentors to help new teachers make the transition into the world of teaching: encourage them to follow the practices that are most like those of good, experienced teachers. Experienced teachers are different from new teachers;…

Novice teachers often find themselves isolated; they are often assigned students with the most difficult challenges, with no mentor, and without professional learning to further develop the skills they began to acquire as student teachers. It is important to disrupt the institutionalized isolation of the novice teacher (Darling-Hammond and Sclan;…

The initiation, organization, and management of a mentor program will be complicated. In the end, at the center of a mentor program are people who are eager to help their colleagues and who have developed some skills for coaching others as they encounter challenges and as they grow as professionals. In this article, the authors offer a rudimentary…

There is an alternative to conventional teacher mentorship. The authors describe and analyze a promising model of mentorship where multiple mentees and mentors, each with varying levels of experience, engage collaboratively in the study of teaching practice. They have found that well-designed contexts in which beginning and experienced teachers…

"Authenticity," "intrinsic motivation," "confidence," and "student choice." More than just jargon, these ideas are essential for student achievement. Facing the pressures of mandated standards and assessments, teachers often replace activities that allow for student choice and multiple outcomes with…