Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This study explores the job satisfaction and career development of beginning teachers in Hong Kong at a time of education reform. The authors are interested to understand teachers’ reasons for joining the profession, and how their personal goals interact with the teaching environment to shape job satisfaction. The participants were eleven graduates from the Post-graduate Diploma of Education (PGDE) Primary Programme of the Hong Kong Institute of Education in 2007. The findings reveal that the school environment was found to be more determinative of teachers’ satisfaction and their initial teaching orientation. The authors suggest that teachers’ level of job satisfaction may be improved through systematically reducing their non-teaching workload by a generous increase in the number of supporting staff in schools.

The current article examines what both in-service and pre-service trainee teachers learn from their early experience of teaching in further education (FE) colleges in England. This article draws on data gathered between 2005 and 2009 from two separate projects. The studies on which this article is based, indicate that many trainee teachers in FE colleges, pre-service or in-service, encounter isolation, poor support and little guidance, however well they manage these conditions. However, the understanding of alienation employed in this article helps to highlight the importance of control and agency in teachers’ development.

In this article, the author analyzes how participation in teacher-led, semester-long, action research projects influences early career teacher perceptions of support and learning. Results show that teacher-led action research projects as a professional development structure contribute to the development of a supportive professional culture, feelings of context-specific support, and feelings of empowerment and being overwhelmed in an urban school staffed primarily with early career teachers.

This study explores the developing professional identity of a new generation of teachers, largely educated during the growth era of ‘performative schooling’ of the 1990s.The article draws specifically on the English experience of reforms in the management of schools and teacher education. The author concludes that these teachers are aware of the potential conflicts between the demands of accountability and the desire for autonomy, but are generally comfortable with the balance they feel able to strike between these.