My experience working with first year writers in courses designed to teach critical thinking and composition has introduced me to a mass of young adults who are anxious when it comes to effective written communication in a college classroom. Not only are they troubled about how to write to an audience of college professors, but they are also…

School leadership theory has evolved since the 1980s from the traditional, hierarchical model to a democratic vision of leadership as an organizational phenomenon (Ogawa & Bossert, 1995). When classroom teachers are engaged in leadership activities, collective empowerment takes root and teachers' commitment to school goals increases. The purpose…

This paper addresses two questions: How well do teachers understand their current pension plans? And, what do they think about alternative plan structures? The data come from administrative records and a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State. The results suggest Washington's teachers are fairly knowledgeable about their pensions, though new…

The purpose of this study was to report United States of America (USA) science teachers' understandings of the internal structures of the human body. The 71 science teachers who participated in this study attended a frog/pig, two-hour dissection workshop at the 2004 National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The…

There have been many areas researched relating to minority teachers and their teaching experience. For example, minority teacher recruitment, the status of minority teachers, the impact minority teachers have on student achievement, and how standardized testing impacts pre-service minority teacher retention and attrition have been studied.…

This autobiographical piece of collaborative discensus (Gershon, 2008; Gershon, Peel & Bilinovich, 2009) presents the authors' interwoven perspectives about the challenges they faced as they talked about race in a pre-service social studies class. Their work here serves two main purposes. First it is an opportunity for a teacher and two former…

Thomas E. Ludwig is the John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology at Hope College, where he joined the faculty in 1977 after receiving his PhD in development and aging from Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on developmental issues in cognitive neuropsychology. He is also the author or coauthor of more than a dozen sets of…

The authors explore the place of tension in understanding narrative inquiry as a relational research methodology. Drawing on a narrative inquiry into children's, teachers', and families' experiences in schools shaped by achievement testing practices that flow from accountability policies, the authors show how attending to tensions is central to…

Although induction support is heralded as an effective way to reduce high attrition among beginning teachers, nationwide increases in induction participation have not been accompanied by a comparable reduction in attrition rates. This inconsistency suggests some induction programs may not provide adequate support. This article presents the results…

The aim of this study was to explore university lecturers' descriptions of their teaching experience with older students. Twelve teachers of the Nau Gran (a university program for older people [UPOP] in Valencia, Spain) were interviewed. We analyzed their responses to questions about their experience of teaching older adults, the rewarding aspects…

This article considers how and what doctoral students learn through teaching, student journal editing and academic career mentoring. It provides a grounded account of doctoral experience as a counter-narrative to prevailing policy discourses that focus on products and overlook the doctorate as a personal and social learning experience.…

As the author began her teaching career at Central Virginia Governor's School for Science and Technology (CVGS), it became apparent that many of her students were interested in doing research projects in astronomy and the number seemed to increase every year. At first she did not think that she had the tools to do a good job accommodating these…

A scarcity of research exists regarding the voices of African American teachers who taught in the rural South. In this study, we report the life experiences, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of three female African American educators as they pertain to their experiences teaching before, during, and after desegregation. Three female African…

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,…

This study analyzed and compared the characteristics of expert and less expert teachers' noticing ability during observation of literacy instruction, and builds a conceptual framework for expert noticing during such teaching. Expert participants (n = 7) were defined as university faculty in reading with intensive and long-term experience in…