The purpose of this study is to examine whether quality and frequency of mentoring predict beginning teachers’ development of professional competence and well-being in the first two years of their career. Findings indicate that the quality of mentoring rather than its frequency explains a successful career start. Additionally, beginning teachers who experience constructivist mentoring show higher levels of efficacy, teaching enthusiasm, and job satisfaction. Constructivist mentoring also reduces emotional exhaustion after one year of training compared to teachers without constructivist mentoring.

This study aims to describe the beliefs of preservice teachers regarding the moral work of teaching. The results reveal that the vast majority of participants expressed the belief that we can indeed teach children to be good. Furthermore, modeling as means of moral education is found to be a dominant theme in the data. Among the discussions of modeling, several sub-themes about the nature of modeling and its role in teaching are reported.

This article aims to guide language teacher educators to address novice teacher emotion systematically in the learning-to-teach experience. The authors used a scheme of a complete orienting basis of the action (SCOBA) to orient language teacher educators as they respond to novice teacher emotions in the activity of journal writing. This analysis demonstrates that emotional content is pervasive in this novice teacher’s journals, and that her emotions are tied to her perezhivanie and her thinking about and activity/outcomes of her teaching. The authors argue that the SCOBA highlights that teacher expression of emotion is intertwined with cognition and activity as part of the developmental process of beginning teachers, and can be addressed in mediation.

The purpose of this study was to explore how middle grades interns planned, conducted, and reflected upon their teaching practices as the result of conducting action research. The findings revealed that conducting action research engaged the participants in inquiry into their own practice. The interns realized that this process gave them the opportunity to question their existing personal beliefs and to reform their personal theories upon which change in practice could support effective student learning. Additionally, this process was a means to reflect upon and determine ways to change their teaching practices. These interns focused on the students and used assessments that would help them to learn how to assist all of their students, including those that were struggling. Finally, meaningful action research that involves critical examination requires a great deal of cooperation.

This study attempts to profile beginning teachers according to their professional identity tensions. These profiles regards beginning teachers' changing role from student to teacher, their care for students and their orientations towards learning to teach. The cluster analysis of these tensions revealed that the participants could be classified into six different profiles, namely: teachers struggling with (views of) significant others, teachers with care-related tensions, teachers with responsibility-related tensions, moderately tense teachers, tension-free teachers, and troubled teachers. Furthermore, 30 of the 42 beginning teachers who completed the questionnaire twice changed profiles after the transition period from student teacher to in-practice teacher.