This article reports on a case study of a school that had ongoing coaching for up to six years. The study focused on coachees’ perspectives, in particular what factors allowed them to achieve their set coaching goals. The investigation into longitudinal coaching (one to six years) indicated how coaches positioned themselves or peers, when reflecting on and seeking to establish why some coaching goals were more achievable than others. A key finding was that coaching goals were deemed attainable when they aligned with coachees’ specific focus, which was reflected by the six core themes that emerged: Pragmatic I, Pragmatic We, Student Driven, Team Driven, Data Driven, Research Driven. The seventh theme (temporality) indicated that over time coachees’ dominant concerns shifted to become less of a focus with other overriding needs emerging.

This study followed a cohort of new early childhood teachers from preparation into their first year of teaching, giving voice to their challenges and triumphs, and insight into the elements of their preparation program which they continued to value and build on in their classroom practice. The findings revealed that participants’ perceptions on those elements of the program which best guided their decisions in practice, such as reflective thinking about their daily work and child observation and inquiry. Overall, although the participants expressed feeling less prepared in terms of specific curricula which aligned with their particular teaching settings, they seemed to feel most prepared in those skills that can be applied broadly across a wide variety of classrooms and educational contexts, such as observation, reflection, and differentiation.

This article examines the teacher educator’s role in promoting resilience within new teachers in the light of tensions between what is healthy and sustainable for individual teachers vs. the institutions in which they work. The article concludes with specific recommendations for those in the international teacher education community. These recommendations include innovating university school partnerships to directly link individual and institutional well-being; structured opportunities for ‘mindfulness-based’ training; providing opportunities for candidates to analyse ‘cases’ of teaching from a macro-micro perspective; and learning how to take a professional stance.

The purpose of this article was to explore dimensions of Swedish preschool teachers’ competence from a student perspective . The findings revealed that students’ definitions of preschool teacher competence were composed of six different dimensions: a general pedagogical competence, specific content competence, distinct teacher competence, play competence, competence of child perspective, and collaborative and social competence. This study contributes to the ambition of seeking out a ‘red thread’ of common understanding of what constitutes early years’ teacher competence.

In this study, the authors were interested to examine the notion of environmental education (EE) as context for integrating the elementary curricula. They examined preservice teachers’ understandings of EE, their ideas to incorporate EE into their future teaching, and their conceptions of EE as a context for integration. The results support the incorporation of EE activities and instruction in science methods courses to enhance instruction in science content and teaching methods. The authors also suggest an explicit focus in the methods course on science and engineering content, inquiry, and cross-cutting concepts as they relate to EE. Results from this study suggest that elementary science methods instructors can include some of this content and method in elementary science method courses.