Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This article uses two narrative portraits of early career teachers to examine the central role of principals in influencing teachers’ feelings of personal and professional well-being, with both negative and positive effects reported. The portraits of two female early career teachers illustrate the vulnerability of many beginning teachers, whose work conditions are dependent on the goodwill and discretion of colleagues and leaders. In both stories, the principals played a central role in terms of the amount and kind of personal support they gave and their leadership in developing the overall school culture.

This paper presents an alternative explanation for turnover—one grounded in organizational theory and substantiated by an emerging line of research. In doing so, it reframes the debate over what fuels high rates of teacher turnover in high-poverty schools and provides advice for policy makers and practitioners. This paper reviews six studies analyzing turnover as a function of school context rather than as a function of student demographics. The review suggests that teachers who leave high-poverty schools are not fleeing their students. Rather, they are fleeing the poor working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and for their students to learn. The working conditions that teachers prize most include school leadership, collegial relationships, and elements of school culture.

This study aims to understand special education teachers’ beliefs regarding their roles and responsibilities. The goal of this study is also to determine how these beliefs differ among more and less accomplished teachers. In this study, the authors examine the interviews of special education teachers identified as either more or less accomplished based on the Reading in Special Education (RISE) observation instrument. Through qualitative coding of the data, several themes about beliefs revealed differences between the teachers. The more accomplished teachers discussed a need for instructional intensity and linked their roles and responsibilities to academic needs.

Utilizing the story as a research tool enables the individual to make unique voice heard and provides information regarding identity. In the education system, we study stories and place the emphasis on beginning teachers. During recent years, hundreds of stories have been collected from teachers in their first year of teaching. The stories were collected by means of a 'call' addressed to those individuals specializing in teaching to participate in a 'story contest'. As a result of the contest, we have collected thousands of stories, all of which enable us to examine the professional reality of beginning teachers in their first year of work. Two processes emerged: (1) the written stories describe and reflect the event that occurred in reality, and (2) the stories construct and shape reality. The processes of reflecting, constructing, and shaping are expressed on two levels: the individual level and the systemic-organizational level.