This paper reports on a study investigating the mindsets of 51 pre-service teachers at an Austrian university using Q methodology. Despite the recent growth in interest in the concept of mindsets, ...little research has addressed the mindsets of teachers – most of it focusing on the mindsets of learners – and the research that does investigate teachers tends to focus on beliefs about learning or intelligence. This study offers a new perspective by focusing on teachers’ beliefs about their own teaching competences. A further aim of the study is to expand the methodological repertoire in language education researchers. This study considers the potential of Q methodology, a research approach used widely in social sciences and education, but, as yet, rare in this field. The data indicate that the most common mindset among the pre-service teachers is one based around a strong belief in the learnability of the more technical aspects of teaching, while interpersonal skills tend to be regarded as more of a natural talent fixed within the individual. One practical implication of this finding is that teacher education programmes may need to pay more attention to explicitly developing the interpersonal side of teaching. A further finding was that teacher mindsets are constructed through individuals’ management of various sets of implicit theories and tend not to conform to the established dichotomous model of mindsets.
Preparing the next generation of preschool teachers who can integrate and make use of ICT to capitalise on and develop young children’s digital competences remains a challenging goal for teacher ...education programmes (TEP). Given the current gaps in the literature, this study aims to expand and deepen our understanding of the extent to which early childhood pre-service teachers encounter ICT during their training and how they are prepared to use digital technologies in their future practices. The empirical data was generated through a focus group study with pre-service teachers and interview with their teacher educators at an institution of higher education in Sweden. The findings of the study suggest that pre-service teachers feel they have not been adequately prepared to integrate ICT into their future educational practices in preschool. Teacher educators, however, demonstrated a completely different perspective, highlighting a variety of initiatives that they were implementing to prepare the next generation of preschool teachers to use digital technologies. It will discuss why pre-service teachers, unlike teacher educators, feel they are not being adequately prepared to use digital technologies in early childhood education. The study also provides a detailed account of the varied procedures involved in preparing pre-service teachers’ digital competences and makes recommendations to teacher educators on how to enhance future preschool teachers’ TPACK.
This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics ...from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers in the same school. We find that teachers' perceptions of the school administration has by far the greatest influence on teacher retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching.
Enjoyment is one of the most relevant and frequently experienced discrete emotions for both teachers and students in classroom learning contexts. Based on theories of emotion transmission between ...interaction partners, we propose a reciprocal effects model linking teachers' and students' enjoyment in class. The model suggests that there are positive reciprocal links between teachers' and students' enjoyment and that these links are mediated by teachers' and students' observations of each other's classroom behaviors. The model was tested using 3-wave longitudinal data collected across the 1st 6 months of a school year from N = 69 teachers (78% female) and their 1,643 students from Grades 5 to 10 (57% female). A multilevel structural equation model confirmed our mediation hypotheses. Teacher enjoyment at the beginning of the school year (Time 1 T1) was positively related to student perceptions of teachers' enthusiasm during teaching 4 weeks later (T2), which was positively related to student enjoyment at midterm (T3). Further, student enjoyment at T1 was positively related to teacher perceptions of their students' engagement in class at T2, which was positively related to teacher enjoyment at T3. This study is the first to provide longitudinal evidence of reciprocal emotion transmission between teachers and students. Implications for future research and teacher training are discussed.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Researchers, educational policymakers, and the general public agree that teachers should radiate enjoyment and thus "infect" their students with excitement about learning. However, emotional contagion in human interaction is not a one-way street. In this research, we proposed that teachers' and students' enjoyment in class are reciprocally linked via mutual social perceptions of how enthusiastic and engaged the interaction partners are. We tested our assumptions using 3-wave longitudinal data collected from approximately 70 classrooms (teachers and their students) across the first 6 months of a school year. The results fully confirmed our expectations. Our findings imply that teachers' emotional experiences in class depend on their students' emotions as much as students' emotional experiences depend on their teachers'. It thus seems that for classrooms to be enjoyable places for everyone involved, one must consider the needs and desires of both learners and teachers.
As student populations become culturally and linguistically diverse, mismatches between students and the mostly White teaching force create challenges for schools and teacher education programs. This ...article—drawing from the Coaching With CARE project and building on research valuing the role of cooperating teachers (CTs) in supporting critical, socially just teaching—examines c/Critical conversations between CTs and preservice teachers (PTs) to highlight ways CTs may bring critical understandings into mentoring work. Findings show that using tools like retrospective video analysis (RVA) and responsive critical discourse analysis (CDA) helped provide space for some CTs to engage in critical discussions of traditional power hierarchies within the classroom, the roles they and their students assume in societal power structures, and ways those understandings may affect their classroom teaching. The examples also demonstrate the challenges facing teacher educators who hope to engage in similar work and importance of professional development for CTs that includes critical reflection on their own identities and power.
Stress research increasingly emphasizes the role of appraisal in determining which events are perceived as stressful. The Classroom Appraisal of Resources and Demands (CARD) was developed to measure ...teachers' appraisals of their classroom demands and resources in order to assess their risk for experiencing occupational stress. The present purposes are to review the literature identifying appraisals as a key determinant of stress, to describe the development of the CARD, and to provide meta-analytic results from 18 studies comparing CARD scores to the following variables: teacher's job satisfaction and occupational commitment, burnout symptoms, stress prevention resources, and challenging student demands. Results suggest moderate effects for associations between the CARD and these constructs, and implications for educational policy aimed at reducing turnover and increasing teacher and student welfare are discussed.
Given calls to diversify the teaching workforce, this review examines research on retention and turnover of teachers of color, focusing on new teachers because they leave at disproportionately high ...rates. Reviewing 70 studies, the authors found that (a) recent national studies identify turnover rates for teachers of color are now higher than those for White teachers; (b) policyamenable school-level conditions related to financial, human, social, and cultural capital can affect retention; (c) teachers of color are more likely than Whites to work and remain in "hard-to-staff" urban schools with high proportions of students from low-income and nondominant racial and cultural communities; and (d) factors affecting the retention of teachers of color can contribute to staffing urban schools with quality teachers, including teachers' humanistic commitments, innovative approaches in the professional preparation of teachers of color, and the presence of multicultural capital in schools.
We designed a video-based course to develop preservice teachers’ vision of ambitious instruction by decomposing instruction to learn to attend to student thinking and to examine how particular ...teaching moves influence student learning. In this study, we examine the influence that learning to systematically analyze ambitious pedagogy in the course has on preservice teachers’ classroom practice. Analysis of preservice teachers’ videos from the Performance Assessment for California Teachers Teaching Event reveals that they engaged in more student-centered practices compared with a cohort of candidates who did not participate in the course—creating opportunities to see student thinking, noticing student thinking during instruction, and pursuing student ideas to learn more about their thinking. We also found that their probing of student thinking focused primarily on correct answers and procedural fluency. These findings have implications for defining a pedagogy of teacher preparation to develop beginning teacher competency.
This edited volume is about diversifying the teaching profession. It is unique in its inclusion of multiple dimensions of diversity; its chapters focus on a wide range of under-represented groups, ...including those from lower socio-economic groups, Black and minority ethnic groups, migrants, the Travelling community, the Deaf community, the LGBTQI+ community and those of mature age. The book includes contributions from Australia, England, Iceland, Portugal and Scotland, as well as a number of chapters from the Irish context, mostly emanating from projects funded under Ireland’s Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Access to Higher Education (PATH): Strand 1—Equity of Access to Initial Teacher Education. The book also critically engages the rationale for diversifying the profession, arguing not only that representation still matters, but also that ultimately teacher diversity work needs to encompass system transformation to achieve a diverse, equitable and inclusive teaching profession.
This article analyzes a programmatic effort in teacher education, “The Community Teaching Strand” (CTS), to engage local community members as mentors of teacher candidates (TCs) in two postgraduate ...teacher preparation programs in a large research university. Three different conceptions of the nature and purpose of teacher–family–community relations frame the analysis: involving families and communities, engaging families and communities, and working in solidarity with families and communities. Three primary research questions are explored in this article: What do TCs learn through their participation in the CTS? To what extent and how do TCs bring community teaching into their classrooms during the program and as first-year teachers? What programmatic features encouraged and/or constrained TC learning from the community mentors? After describing Mountain City’s “Community Teaching Strand,” the article identifies a set of TC learning and practice outcomes as well as a number of tensions that arose in the programs in the attempt to implement engagement and solidarity approaches to working with families and communities. Finally, the implications of this work for teacher education are discussed.
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