Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This paper explores the micropolitical staffroom experiences of two beginning health and physical education teachers. The two narratives draw attention to how the context of the staffroom significantly shaped and reshaped the beginning teachers’ micropolitical learning and practices throughout their first year of teaching. The findings reveal that staffroom occupants shaped situations which beginning teachers encountered. The two beginning teachers became more micropolitically ‘literate’ overtime with a more in depth understanding of the particular context and prevailing micropolitical staffroom stories. The authors recommend that more attention needs to be paid to the staffroom as a micropolitical context in which beginning teachers transition, learn and develop professional and micropolitical identities.

This paper discusses to what extent students of teaching in early entry teacher education programs experience their work environment as a stimulating learning environment. The results indicate that in most schools opportunities for learning are incidental and not in the form of labour. Student teachers are not gently introduced into the practice of teaching, gradually taking more responsibilities and becoming experts. Besides, the core of the practices for teachers is enacted in classrooms where student teachers are left to their own devices. However, autonomy is highly valued but double-edged: a source of motivation and isolation. Furthermore, when knowledge exchange, reflection and problem solving occur, they have little prospect of improving student teachers’ conceptual knowledge and deep understanding.

This article reexamines the data set of a longitudinal study of four novice EFL teachers’ motivation in the context of Japan. The article attempts to illuminate novice teachers’ changing motivation and self-concept as situated in the routines of their first teaching posts. A major finding of this study is the weakened effects of ideal selves as future self-guides. Another salient characteristic which was found about novice teachers’ motivation and self-concept was the power of reflexivity. The four novice teachers’ stories in the second stage showed that the responsibilities, constraints, pressure, and joy of the reality of secondary school teaching induced serious reflective thoughts in their minds.

This research explores the perspectives of newly qualified primary teachers (NQTs) who worked in multilingual classrooms in their first year of teaching. The findings indicated that that NQTs were engaged in reflection on pupils’ needs and interests and then try to tailor provision to engage pupils in formative challenging activities. Twenty one NQTs believed that they had begun to develop responsive forms of teaching, aided by support from and collaboration with other colleagues, including teaching assistants, many bilingual.