Section archive - Beginning Teachers

For teachers of immigrant-origin students and their peers, emerging research notes the challenge of facilitating a high-quality education for students subject to traumatic events related to harsh immigration enforcement policies. This study examines whether new teachers from seven teacher preparation programs experienced the impacts of immigration enforcement and felt prepared to support students who were impacted. The author surveyed new teachers in preservice and after 1 year of teaching (N = 473) using survey instruments developed by Cohen and colleagues along with additional constructs developed via pilot testing. New teachers reported that immigration enforcement negatively impacted their students and their job satisfaction. Teachers exposed to discussion of immigration policy and teachers who reported engaging with immigrant families in preservice were more likely to view themselves as prepared to support students. He discusses differences for teachers in urban, Title I, and elementary settings.

Compared to their more experienced colleagues, novice teachers are more likely to experience burn-out and leave the profession. They are also more likely to be assigned out-of-field. This paper shines a light on the emotional and cognitive nature of what is involved for these teachers as they learn to teach out-of-field. Fortune lines technique was used by four novice secondary teachers to reflect on how their perceived capacity and enjoyment changed in their out-of-field and in-field teaching practice, and the influences that caused those changes. Analysis showed that teachers experienced more growth in capacity and enjoyment in their out-of-field contexts compared to in-field, but that their experience of learning was more disrupted. Twelve interconnected categories of influence were identified, but teachers’ unique experiences show that tailored support should be informed by an understanding of what factors corrode and enhance each teacher’s perceived capacity and enjoyment.

Novice teachers’ need for support and induction is widely recognized, and so is the role of principals in that process. Accountability-driven reforms in education have compelled principals to increasingly focus on managerial responsibilities, whereas teachers are subjected to external assessment of their professional qualities and their students’ learning outcomes. This role division can undermine the principals’ readiness for instructional leadership and can affect their perceptions of novice teachers’ needs, knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which in turn potentially inhibits adequate support given to novice teachers. Therefore, it is important to know how principals and novice teachers assess novice teachers’ professional qualities. In this study, the authors investigated the Estonian preschool principals’ and novice preschool teachers’ assessments of the professional skills of novice teachers. Fifty-seven principals and 61 first-year teachers responded to a written questionnaire. They first found that, in almost all aspects, the novice teachers assessed their professional skills higher than did the preschool principals. Second, they found that when combining the assessments of both groups of respondents, the lowest ratings were given on novice teachers’ skills in working with children with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and with children with special needs. They discuss relevant implications for early childhood teacher education.

The article discusses parent–teacher relationships in school micropolitics based on beginning teachers’ stories. The authors employ a narrative approach and investigate how micropolitical conditions and strategies are portrayed in beginning teachers’ stories of parent–teacher relationships. The research material consists of narrative interviews with seven Finnish primary school teachers in the first and second years of their careers. The findings indicate that micropolitical processes play a part in constructing parent–teacher relationships. These micropolitics both enable and limit these relationships and influence how beginning teachers learn to cope with parent relationships. The findings reveal various micropolitical strategies that beginning teachers use to enact and construct parent–teacher relationships. Furthermore, the findings show that parent–teacher relationships do not necessarily include just parents and teachers, but are multidimensional, encompassing several intertwined relationships that micropolitically condition parent–teacher relationships. The implications for pre- and in-service teacher education and school leaders are considered.