Background: Long-standing calls to infuse technical language in teaching--what we call the Professional Language Project--have been revived in recent years along with the core practices movement in teacher education. The Professional Language Project has been identified as a desired outcome of research and a potential benefit to teacher education.…

Background/Context: In the United States, strengthening the professionalization of teaching and teacher education has received extensive attention. Notably, the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) has gained traction. Developed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, & Equity (SCALE) in 2009, edTPA requires teacher…

Background/Context: This article introduces the special issue on reimagining research and practice at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. The authors provide an overview of previous research at this "crossroads" and describe how the special issue collaborators have sought to chart fresh ground in light of…

Background/Context: The evolution of validity understandings from mid-century to now has emphasized that test validity depends on test purpose--adding consequence considerations to issues of interpretation and evidentiary warrants. Purpose: To consider the tensions created by multiple purposes for assessment and sketch briefly how we got to where…

Background: Much research has been done on the factors that influence teachers' work. Yet, the nature and scope of those factors, and their impact on teachers, remain unclear. Indeed, different literature bases on teachers' work present different and often contradictory conclusions. For example, some researchers claim that mandated accountability…

Background/Context: A fundamental tension has long existed between school reform proposals and actual teaching practice. Despite a large literature on teacher change, the discontinuity between innovation and practice continues and many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of…

Background/Context: If education centrally involves self-cultivation, and the teacher's own robust selfhood is necessary for inspiring self-cultivation in students, then teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education. But teaching is seen as a helping profession, where helping others always seems, in practice if not in principle,…

Background/Context: Over the past decade, a growing chorus of educational stakeholders has called for the recruitment of more Black men into the American teaching profession, casting these men as ideal surrogate father figures for Black youth who may lack adult male role models in their families or communities. Although a small body of scholarly…

Background/Context: Most people who study the history and philosophy of education have heard of essentialism, but few people know the story behind how, when, and why the movement came to exist. This paper tells this story for the first time. Purpose/Conclusions: This essay has three purposes. First, it provides an introduction to the life and…

Background/Context: Teacher retention, especially of qualified teachers within high-poverty schools, is an issue of local, national, and international concern. School staffing research has typically examined two groups: those who remain in full-time classroom teaching versus those who quit teaching altogether. This article complicates the teacher…

Uses the movie, "The Matrix," to evoke both metaphors for human existence and models for learning and teaching by examining two metaphors that have dominated notions of and approaches to education in the United States and arguing for seeking, crafting, and embracing metaphors that cast students as the principal creators of their education and…

Teaching entails the creation of connections among teacher, student, and content so that educational experiences can be had. Powerful teaching engages and recalls a lure of learning. To explore this lure, or love of learning, and its place in teaching, I first evoke a bit of what this attraction feels and looks like. Depicting this lure conveys…

This essay is a philosophical and sociological reconsideration of the nature of teaching and work. It draws broadly from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and materialist models of the economic subject. It begins from an acknowledgment and review of the critiques of current policy orientations to testing and accountability in the United States,…

Context: Drawing from Ingersoll's (2001) study of teacher attrition, Huberman's (1989) study of the professional life cycle of teachers, and recent retention/attrition literature across the professions, this study seeks to make sense of the complexities of contemporary teachers' careers in light of changes in social and economic forces, the…

The recognition of teaching as a special relationship among individuals is currently being overlooked in much contemporary educational research and policymaking. The author examines the philosophy of rationality in teaching and relates it to the educational vision presented in George Orwell's novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four." (CB)