Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This article examines the psychological processes involved in constructing professional identities among novice teachers as expressed in stories they wrote about their induction year. The examination of these processes through narrative analysis with a literary dimension focuses on the teachers’ struggles with the conflicts, tensions, and gaps that arose during this year. The findings reveal that every story emphasizes one of the three aspects with which the novice teachers cope: has conflict, tension and gaps with which the novice teachers must cope.

This study investigates the relationship between new teachers' beliefs about instruction and teaching practices. It also discusses some possible reasons for the relationships between teacher beliefs and teacher practices within national and international contexts. To examine the relationships between new teachers’ beliefs and their instructional practices, the authors selected new teachers in four OECD countries including Hungary, Korea, Norway, and Turkey. The findings showed that the instructional practices of new teachers from the four selected countries were neither consistent nor aligned with their beliefs about instruction. One of the reasons for this result may be that new teachers’ self-reported instructional practices might differ significantly from their actual performance.

This article describe a high-impact, low-cost, super-capstone course. The course is high-impact because graduating seniors regularly evaluate the course as being one of the most valuable of their college experience. It is low-cost because it requires minimal faculty resources, and super-capstone because it caps a capstone course. The authors described four instructional principles: (1) student-centered learning, (2) affective and experiential learning, (3) empathic listening, and (4) collaborative learning and sharing. The principles are central to humanistic education. They can be implemented in various ways and degrees in a wide variety of courses and disciplines, in large lecture classes and small seminars, and in many other teaching/learning circumstances as well.

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.