The role of school teachers is becoming increasingly complex. This complexity may be even more pronounced for physical education teachers, who must often cope with additional challenges stemming from marginalization, isolation, and teacher/coach role conflict. Physical education teachers must also manage relationships with colleagues,…

Teacher preparation has been under intense scrutiny in recent years. In order for preparation of special education teacher candidates to remain viable, candidate assessment practices must apply practices identified in the extant literature base, while special education teacher education researchers must extend this base with rigorous efforts to…

This narrative inquiry traces a beginning teacher's unfolding career over a six-year period in a diverse middle school in the fourth largest city in the USA. The work revolves around two conceptualizations: "stories to live by" and "stories to leave by." How these identity-related phenomena surface and play out in an…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of e-mailed specific performance feedback that included progress monitoring graphs on induction-level teachers' ratios of positive-to-negative communication behaviors and their use of behavior-specific praise in classrooms for students with emotional and behavioral disorders, mild intellectual…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

Working to match mentors with new teachers, one consideration was the physical proximity of the mentor to the newcomer. If the mentor occupied a room next door or across the hall, this position suggested that the new teacher had easy access to this important resource in times of urgency. Such arrangements are not always possible. In this article,…

This project combines qualitative and quantitative data to provide a comprehensive examination of mentoring practice in an attempt to understand the ways in which mentoring leads to positive outcomes for beginning teachers and their students in AISD during 2010-2011.

Guided by new structuralism theory, this study examined the context of novice teacher socialization, identified the frequency and substance of interactions between novice teachers and their mentors and other colleagues, and reported on novices' evaluation of the support that they received. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with…

Mentoring and induction programs are popular within the public school system in the United States. Additionally, content-based mentoring programs exist, such as those within agricultural education. A number of studies yielded results that showed a relationship between mentoring/induction participation and teacher retention. The importance of the…

Novice teacher attrition has long been a concern among educators and policy makers who have responded with various types of induction and mentoring programs and increased efforts to recruit more teachers. Yet, these efforts have not created the stable work force needed to implement school reform efforts. The school staffing challenge is further…

Scope and Method of Study. The purpose of the evaluation study was to determine the effectiveness of the Belize Primary School Teacher Induction Program through the perceptions of three participant groups; newly qualified teachers, their mentors, and their principals. Evaluation methods were used, including a researcher developed survey. Findings…

This dissertation is a qualitative study on the decision-making of administrators within California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) teacher induction program. The study focuses on examining how declining resources act as a pressure, how well-established research on cutback management predict the behaviors of the BTSA…

Recent media reports of teacher shortages across the country are confirmed by the analysis of several national datasets reported in this brief. Shortages are particularly severe in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual/English learner education, and in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. Shortages are…

Mentors need to be proactive in helping the newer teacher to anticipate the critical episodes that inevitably face any teacher. These episodes include the challenge to manage a daunting workload while following habits necessary to stay healthy; to recover from disappointments, errors, and disrespect; to form positive relationships with students,…

Despite the complexity of teaching, learning to teach in universities is often "learning by doing". To provide novice university teachers with pedagogic teaching knowledge and to help them develop specific teaching objectives, we created a structured, video-based, one-year training program. In focusing on the core features of…