Background/Context: Despite noted difficulties with defining and assessing teacher dispositions, U.S. state education departments and national accreditation agencies have included dispositions in mandates and standards both for determining teacher quality and for assessing the quality of the teacher preparation programs that certify them. Thus,…

Context: As instructional part-time, non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) come to constitute an increasing proportion of all teaching faculty in the United States, significant research has investigated the experiences and perspectives of these essential higher education workers. In past decades, a subset of this work has sought to typologize this…

Background/Context: Kindergarten mathematics instruction is critical for students' future academic success. The nature and quality of this instruction may vary depending on classroom characteristics. However, little empirical work has examined how mathematics instruction in kindergarten might differ based on classroom performance levels. Purpose,…

Background: Today's teachers are turning to online educational marketplaces, such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT), where they purchase teacher-created classroom materials for a small fee. Meanwhile, teachers who sell resources in these spaces, online teacherpreneurs, stand to benefit financially and may experience other affordances as well as…

Background: Over the past couple of decades, new teachers have become a pronounced focus of policy makers. This attention is a result of demographic shifts in the teacher labor market, increased attention to the quality of teachers assigned to historically underserved student populations, and high rates of new teacher turnover. Purpose: Our goal…

Background/Context: As grounding for our work, we consider the creation and development of the teaching profession as a particularly "feminine" role. We then briefly describe the contemporary context of schooling, particularly related to neoliberal accountability and its impact on teachers' experiences. This comparison shows that the…

Background: To stem the tide of teacher turnover and prevent shortages, teacher turnover interventions and policies often focus on new and novice teachers because evidence suggests that teacher turnover is particularly high among these teachers. In addition, researchers continue to investigate the root causes of the high teacher turnover observed…

Background: Much of the previous research in teacher attrition and retention focuses on teachers in general, without regard to specific types of teachers. We focus on English language arts (ELA) and English as a second language (ESL) teachers because the United States has stubbornly low achievement in reading, and reading is critical to the…

Background/Context: Culturally relevant education (CRE) is a powerful tool for improving students' educational experiences and outcomes. Yet CRE is not the norm in U.S. public education systems (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011, 2012; Borrero et al., 2016; Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016), perhaps because teachers are socialized into systems that…

Background: The charter school movement relies on teachers as critical components. Teacher commitment is an important aspect of teachers' lives, because it is an internal force for teachers to grow as professionals. It is also considered one of the crucial factors in influencing various educational outcomes, including teacher effectiveness,…

Background: Though policy makers are beginning to hold schools accountable for reducing chronic absenteeism, little attention has been paid to the role of teachers. No known study has examined whether rising cohorts of new teachers feel prepared to address this challenge. This is particularly problematic given that teachers with less experience…

Background: Racial inequities are a persistent reality in K-12 schools in the United States. There is a need for consensus and coordination between principals and teachers if they are to address the harm of racial inequities in education. Yet, despite this need and the interdependence of teachers and principals in schools, their preparation is…

Background/Context: Prior research demonstrates that the policy images of critical target populations, which reflect the ways in which they are socially constructed in the political sphere, have important implications for policy prescriptions and design (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Jansen, 2001; Schneider & Ingram, 1993). In examining the…

Background/Context: Community-based youth theater programs afford youth opportunities to explore and "author" new identities by "performing writing." Yet, we know much less about the ways in which immigrant youth are exploring struggles and changes within their families and ethnic community. We particularly lack research about…

Background: Student engagement is a cognitively complex domain that is often oversimplified in theory and practice. Reliance on a single model overlooks the sophisticated nature of student engagement and can lead to misconceptions and limited understandings that hinder teachers' ability to engage all of their students. Assessing varied models…