Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This study examines teachers’ behavioral, academic, and relational beliefs and how these beliefs shape the actions used in managing their classrooms. The author found that the participants focused primarily on behavior and academics when managing classrooms. The author concludes that these results suggest that a more relational orientation to classroom management is related to instructional quality. The author found that teachers also tended to implement actions that were consistent with their beliefs of classroom management, although they differed from one another in the extent that they focused on relational aspects.

This study aimed to better understand how teachers negotiate their emergent identities and the role emotional transactions play in this process. The authors organized the findings by four key features of what we call the process of ‘identity work’: (1) Incoming teacher beliefs; (2) Teacher identity emotional episodes; (3) Teacher attributions, and (4) and Identity adjustment. All of the participants could identify episodes or experiences during which they had salient emotional responses. Some participants elaborated the ways that these emotional responses served to confirm or further teacher identities/expectations they brought with them into their first year of teaching. Others argued that these events triggered a process of questioning or exploration regarding what their incoming beliefs were.

This article explored the differences between expert and novice teachers' perceptions and interpretations of problematic classroom events. The authors identified a number of differences in the way experts and novices perceived, interpreted and explained the problematic situations with which they were presented. The findings reveal that the novice teachers expressed significantly more visual perceptions. The experts, however, offered significantly more interpretations: they provided inferences about students, inferences about the teacher, and explanatory and/or reasoning statements. The authors conclude that novice teachers perceive students as key contributors to the problems which arise and escalate. However, the experts share their reasoning, explicating how and when problems emerge.

This study examines whether teacher retention and effectiveness among novice teachers in their first and second year of teaching can be predicted by differences in grit. The findings indicate that grittier teachers were more likely to complete the school year and outperformed their less gritty colleagues. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that consistent with the applicants in sample 1, applicants in sample 2 whose résumés revealed evidence of passion and perseverance for long-term goals became novice teachers whose students made more academic progress under their guidance. The authors argue that these findings contribute to a better understanding of what leads some novice teachers to outperform others and remain committed to the profession.