Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This study aimed to examine the specific problems of beginning teachers in Dutch urban primary schools. The findings reveal that beginning teachers encounter several challenges in urban primary schools. The authors found that most prominent challenges were common problems that teacher encounter at schools, such as a high workload, stress and inadequate guidance and support. The participants also mentioned that they had difficulties handling with parental involvement. They had Interactions with highly educated and critical parents as well as interactions with parents from cultural minority groups. They found both types of interactions as difficult to handle.

This longitudinal study investigated four secondary social studies teachers, who identified as being constructivist teachers, during their student teaching practicum through their first year of teaching in the classroom. Specifically, this study focused on the relationship between the teachers’ constructivist-oriented beliefs and their use of related practices in their history classrooms. The findings showed that issues of classroom control were major barriers for the implementation of constructivist-oriented practices. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the participants had a limited development of practical tools. The author argues that although their teacher preparation program exposed them to many different types of instructional techniques and their methods course included the teaching of a model lesson to the class, the participants desired more practical tools as they entered their first year.

This study examined how primary school teachers were trained to teach early reading and mathematics in six Sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda). The authors found that Tanzanian primary teachers were most inclusive. They found that newly-qualified teachers saw various explanations for their learners' difficulties. It was found that the participants had positive overall attitudes towards their learners. These positive feelings seemed to include all, with little evidence of teachers potentially marginalizing learners through low expectations of their ability to learn.

In this study, the authors examined whether preservice teachers’ experiences with video analyses during teacher preparation had long-lasting effects on their reflective practices once they entered the profession. Specifically, they examined whether teachers who had opportunities to analyze student thinking and learning during teacher preparation, continued to do so when they reflected on their teaching effectiveness as full-time teachers. The authors found that teachers who attended the video-enhanced course during teacher preparation outperformed their counterparts in both the quality of evidence they drew upon and their attention to individual or subgroups of learners. The results highlight that different teachers thought differently about their lessons when asked whether they were effective.