This booklet, which is designed to help individuals match themselves with jobs, discusses the common skills, abilities, and habits all employees need to bring to a job, as well as occupation-specific characteristics and skills. The first half of the booklet is a discussion of considerations in choosing a career that covers the following topics:…

This paper examines the relative strengths of two conceptions of teaching. The "thinner conception," which underpins a report of the Ministerial Committee on Teacher Education in South Africa, takes the definitive purpose of teaching as the organization of systematic learning. The "thicker conception" draws on work by Martha…

Baking in the woods can be a lot of fun and can help to make a good trip an amazing one. It does take some time, planning, and preparation, and chosen recipes should be tested in the oven at home before trying them out with friends on a 10-day trip. Outdoor baking requires a different set of rules and equipment than those one uses at home and a…

Many people may think knowledge management is only applicable to enterprises. In fact, the inventor of knowledge management, Peter F. Drucker (2000), once stated that knowledge management can also be applied to schools and the major difference lies in the nature of how things are managed rather than what principles or norms are applied.…

Though teaching yet has its advocates, more and more teachers are leaving the profession after only a few years in the school setting. The satisfactions of this impossibly complex and difficult profession are less and less obvious in this era of accountability and high stakes testing. Indeed, I suggest that the satisfactions often ascribed to the…

Based on recent findings that post-retirement adjustment may be influenced by the conditions leading up to the decision to retire, we examine the impact of individual agency in the retirement decision on problematic drinking behavior, as well as the extent to which such an effect may itself depend upon the valence of the pre-retirement work…

Concern has been expressed about the vulnerability of the "academic profession" as a consequence of threats from productivism, managerialism and the like (Beck and Young, Br J Sociol Educ 26(2):183-197, 2005). I question the apparent self-understanding of academe as a profession. Referring to thinking from higher education (Barnett, High Educ…

Kathleen McEvoy describes her experience after achieving tenure at Washington & Jefferson College (Pennsylvania). She reflects on how she could have better prepared for her post-tenure academic existence and how the teaching profession could do a better job managing the earning of tenure. In retrospect she realizes that she may have been able…

The health care professions have gained significant notoriety as one of the fastest growing career opportunities in the country. In particular, physical therapy has gained a reputation as a vital and significant member of the health care team. The physical therapy field has struggled to provide adequate services to meet patients' needs due to the…

Interest in understanding how principals and school districts hire teachers has increased as empirical evidence on teacher effectiveness has grown. Case studies suggest late hiring timelines are pervasive in large urban school districts and result in the loss of more qualified teachers to surrounding suburbs. This paper uses labor market fixed…

This is one in a series of policy briefs on key education issues prepared by the RAND Corporation for the Obama administration. A pay-for-performance system of educator compensation has been proposed to improve teacher effectiveness and thus improve student achievement. While there is some evidence that such systems work, there are numerous …

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to Arizona State University (ASU) on October 20-21, 2008 to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program. These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by ASU and identified by the AED research team,…

This paper discusses the most relevant issues concerning teacher evaluation in primary and secondary education by reviewing the recent literature and analysing current practices within the OECD countries. First, it provides a conceptual framework highlighting key features of teacher evaluation schemes. In particular, it emphasises the importance…

Current scholarship views organizational socialization as a learning process that is primarily the responsibility of the newcomer. Yet recent learning research recognizes the importance of the social interactions in the learning process. This study investigated how newly hired engineers at a large manufacturing company learned job-related tasks…

In his presidential address Jess Gilbert examines two democratic experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the New Deal: first, county planning that coordinated federal programs through citizen committees, and second, land redistribution to landless southern farmers, including a small number of black sharecroppers…