Few studies have explored the work of successful beginning teachers in diverse settings. This investigation follows one promising young, white elementary teacher through her student teaching in the inner city of Washington, D.C. and into her first year of teaching in a suburban, diverse Virginia school. Seven themes articulate her journey into…

This study describes the meaning of program quality for a representative group of parents of children enrolled in public prekindergarten programs. Educators often conceptualized quality in terms of structural or process indicators; parents most often cited teacher experience and relationship to children. Families, like educators, emphasized…

In pursuit of quality, the learning process should be continuously improved by changing, among other things, the learning material and the way learning is facilitated. A concern for academics, teaching experience in the B.Ed. module: Personnel Management, a module offered by means of distance education at the University of South Africa, is to…

In this article, we report some of the findings of a study of the perceptions of secondary teachers about their experiences as full-time second-year teachers in urban public schools. The frustrations felt by this groups of teachers emerged as a strong theme; it is the nature of these frustrations that we explore in this article.

New teachers are unprepared for school politics and the conflicts they experience with administrators, colleagues and policies. Research and practice on mentoring often ignore organizational contexts. This article explores these under-examined contexts, asking: (1) What do mentors need to know and be able to do in relation to school and district…

Promoting local development in order to support school improvement is an important aspect of contemporary educational policy in Sweden. Recent state initiatives have sought to combine curriculum and teacher development. A common form of cooperation is facilitation, where academics support groups of teachers in their school projects. This article…

This paper reports on a small-scale case study of five newly qualified teachers in one school. The aim of the study was to identify the context and learning factors that enable and constrain the professional growth of new teachers, and to locate the place of formal induction arrangements within the broader experiences of the first year in…

This is the 9th annual report on conditions affecting the Racine Unified School District RUSD). Over the past decade, the conditions affecting the district as well as the school outcomes have changed in some ways and remained stable in others. This analysis compares RUSD to nine peer school districts and the state of Wisconsin. RUSD peer…

A longitudinal investigation determined the growth of reading comprehension from third to fifth grades in a cohort of students who received Language Enrichment (LE), an Orton-Gillingham-based literacy program, during first and second grades. The LE instruction was provided by regular education teachers who received comprehensive training in…

This document gives anecdotal stories of child art making along with philosophical interpretations for art teaching application. Art making is seen as experimental. It progresses from action to intentional mark making, naming, symbolic representation, and finally to "presence", an aesthetic creation experience that combines seeing and…

The overall assessment of teacher education students by means of testing may not be the best indicator of competence in a professional field. Assessors must possess both valid and reliable ways of discerning which students have the necessary skills to be effective in the classroom. Portfolio analysis is one way to get better, more valid data about…

In an effort to establish a quality middle grades teacher education program that would be responsive to local needs, the Middle Grades Education (MGE) faculty at Georgia's Valdosta State University implemented Reality 401, a field based program, in Fall 1992. The program is a senior year teacher education program designed to provide a…

The purpose of this study was to characterize and compare novice and experienced elementary teachers' pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of three major topics in mathematics: whole number operation, fractions, and geometry. The study participants were 26 preservice elementary teachers and 28 experienced kindergarten through…

This paper presents the latest in a series of studies examining school district report cards. The purpose was to study the relationships among factors reported on school district report cards from Nevada high schools. The 44 categories reported on Nevada's 1993-94 report card represent the study's independent variables, grouped into the areas of…

In 1995, 17 graduate students at the University of Wisconsin attended a summer course titled Education 570: Integrating the Curriculum. This course was based on a constructivist view of knowledge development, and participating teachers represented a wide range of subject areas and grade levels. A study of participating teachers followed 16…