This paper examines how early career teachers cope with or manage the challenges that they experience during the transition from pre-service to the first and then the second year of teaching as they seek to establish stable, positive, professional identities and teach effectively in various school and policy contexts. Findings from three waves of…

Opportunities for self-guided professional development provided a context for exploring ways that mid-career teachers designed learning projects and articulated their perceptions of professional growth. In their applications for small grants for materials and released time, participants identified their own personal goals for improving…

This article reports findings from a study of 14 beginning teachers in their first year of teaching in primary schools. By the end of the first year, half were reconsidering their long-term commitment to teaching. The study found they were considering leaving because they were struggling to be the teachers they had envisaged being. One reason for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of pre-service physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) on the subject of electricity and magnetism after their completion of physics and mathematics courses. A descriptive longitudinal development research was carried out with 13 pre-service teachers (PTs) who completed…

This study aimed at investigating Islamic Education teachers' and Arabic Language teachers' perceptions of authentic assessment in Jordan, and exploring the effects of factors related to teachers' specialization, gender and years of experience on their understanding of the implications of this kind of assessment. In this mixed-method research, a…

The paper reports on an in-depth narrative case study of an immigrant background English as a Second Language teacher's emotional experience in a teacher professional community in England. The data are derived from the teacher's "emotion diaries" and six interviews during the three-month period when she taught on a pre-sessional English…

The authors conducted a phenomenological inquiry that described factors that influenced two novice and two experienced teachers' decisions to remain in the teaching field. These teachers taught in both Title I and non-Title I elementary schools, and their teaching experiences ranged from four months to 38 years. Data for this research…

Teacher knowledge, as an important cognitive basis of teaching, has attracted tremendous attention in educational research in the last few decades. This study examines whether teachers' self-perceived knowledge about oral English teaching differs with regard to their professional profiles in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context in…

This paper is an account of the early career narrative of a young Emirati teacher, Amal, against the backdrop of the radical reformation of state schooling underway in the United Arab Emirates. Amal's decision to become a teacher was influenced by negative school experiences in her own childhood, thus fuelling her desire to "have a hand in…

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that examined the experiences of six preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong as they prepared for, engaged in, and reflected upon a compulsory research project during the final year of their Bachelor of Education degree program. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and using methods of…

Using a longitudinal design, the job satisfaction and career development of beginning teachers are explored in the present study. Beginning teachers were initially interviewed after graduation from the teacher training programme and then after gaining a two-year teaching experience. The results are presented in a fourfold typology in which the…

Philosophers have written extensively about values and have long understood that internalized values define character and decisions. However, scholarship on sources of values, particularly for teachers, remains relatively unexplored. Sources of teachers' values are usually mentioned only in passing in books or articles dealing with other aspects…

An overview is presented of a three-year project aimed at helping Chinese language teachers in Taiwan refine ways that Chinese, an ideographic language that differs markedly from alphabetic English, is taught in primary schools. Guided by university staff in Taiwan, Hong Kong University and a Taiwanese non-government social enterprise, 20…

The purpose of this research is to seek the connection between professional development and an MA thesis research project, which is conducted as part of initial teacher education in Finland. This article examines the experiences of teachers with work experience, but without an official qualification, who recently completed their MA thesis. The…

Over the past 20 years, the Professional Development School (PDS) model has been proven to be a successful way to induct teacher candidates into the teaching profession. Induction has been recognized as a way to counteract attrition from a profession that loses as many as 50% of its teachers within five years of entry. Using the PDS model of…