Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This paper presents a case study of an early career teacher in order to illustrate and provide a platform from which to consider two teacher leadership roles – the consulting teacher in Maryland, USA and the specialist classroom teacher in New Zealand. The case study presented in this article show how teachers can be mobilized to accept the leadership of their colleagues when their talk is about learning.

The goal of this study was to examine the lived experiences of teachers newly appointed to rural or remote schools in Western Australia to understand their experiences and responses. Rural/remote teachers reported a high incidence of stress and coping strategies. Teachers demonstrate a diversity of direct-action, palliative and avoidant coping strategies focused on management of emotions, health and wellbeing.

In this article, the authors tested the hypothesis that first-year teachers could take up forms of ambitious pedagogy under the following conditions: 1) that reform-based practices introduced in teacher preparation would be the focus of collaborative inquiry throughout the first year of teaching, 2) that participants use analyses of their students’ work as the basis of critique and change in practice, and 3) that special tools be employed that help participants hypothesize about relationships between instruction and student performance. Eleven secondary science teachers engaged in tool-supported collegial analysis of their students’ work over two years, spanning pre-service and in-service contexts.

This article argues that the staffroom is an important professional learning space where beginning teachers interact to understand who they are and the nature of their professional work. The authors highlight the theoretical importance of space and place in the construction and negotiation of beginning teacher subjectivities. The authors conclude by calling for greater research attention to the significance of the staffroom and its interaction with teacher subjectivities.