The Bliss And Blisters Of Early Career Teaching

This vital book is a unique collection of the Canadian research on teacher induction and mentoring. It makes a timely and valuable contribution by bringing together the pan-Canadian voices of authors who are passionate about the development of early career teachers.

This book discusses teacher evaluation and how it can provide the foundations for professional development. The editors and contributors illustrate how teachers with varying levels of expertise, experience and learning needs can benefit from differentiated evaluation and professional development designed to help them reach their full potential. The book examines various aspects of differentiation including levels of experience from pre-service to veteran, practices of school principals as they supervise and evaluate staff, and wider education policies that can support or hinder differentiation. Providing fascinating insights into how teacher evaluation policies can support practice in a variety of contexts, this timely collection will be of interest and value to students and scholars of teacher evaluation and professional development.

Engaging in Educational Research-Practice Partnerships guides academic researchers into forming mutually respectful, collaborative, and scalable partnerships with school practitioners. Despite robust theoretical and conceptual planning, research on learning is often removed from real settings and generates findings with limited practical relevance, yielding frustration for K-12 stakeholders. This book provides invaluable resources to researchers seeking to work with practitioners as they solve problems and improve outcomes while answering fundamental questions about who gets to generate knowledge, from where, to whom, and in what contexts. A range of illustrative case studies and strategies explores how to apply appropriate theories and methodologies, negotiate agendas that ensure mutually beneficial goals, determine the role of pracademics, establish institutional supports, policies, and procedures that amplify impact and sustainability, and much more.

This book provides perspectives and insights across the educational system for how we might move toward living out this wish in all schools. The chapters provide perspectives on fundamental questions that have been guiding recent research on wellbeing in schools: How do school communities flourish together? How does supporting educator wellbeing connect to teaching, learning, leading in schools? What characteristics, qualities and strategies support the wellbeing of the whole school community? This book is unique in that it answers these questions from the perspectives of teachers, students, administrators in K-12 schools, as well as from university and the wider community. Importantly, these chapters provide a repertoire of varied answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How can we leverage what works well to grow more, to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute? These chapters serve as examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts ways they can grow wellbeing through a focused attention on building appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and leading in all schools.

This volume of the Perspectives on Mentoring Series explores the role of mentoring in promoting wellbeing of both mentees or proteges and mentors in K-12 school settings. At its core, mentoring is about helping, advising, supporting, and guiding mentees and proteges to gain a wide variety of skills, abilities, and/or attributes. Another outcome of mentoring, less often discussed, is the positive impact it can have on the mental health and wellbeing of both the mentor and mentee. Of particular interest for this edited volume is how mentoring can promote mental health, build resilience, and develop capacity to maintain and sustain emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing for all in the K-12 school settings. The notion of wellbeing, in general, includes both hedonic aspects of feeling good (positive emotions) and eudemonic (conducive to happiness) aspects of living well that entail experiences of positive relationships, meaningfulness in life and work, senses of mastery and personal growth, autonomy, and achievement. This edited volume expands and adds to the existing literature on mentoring in schools, by offering a collection of works that examine the connection between mentorship and wellbeing. This volume includes chapters that describe effective mentoring for wellbeing, detail positive approaches to mentoring youth, offer recommendations for growing the wellbeing of pre-service teachers, early career teachers, and mid-late career teachers, illustrate approaches to growing a community of educators through mentoring and developing teacher leaders as agents of change and facilitators of wellbeing, and discuss studies and models for nurturing and promoting wellbeing among and through school leaders in national and international settings. Through these chapters, authors advocate for greater attention to how to support and nurture wellbeing as central to mentorship efforts in K-12 school settings. ENDORSEMENTS: "Mentoring for Wellbeing in Schools shines light on wellbeing in studies of mentoring in K–12 education. This collection provides researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike with a rich array of wellbeing in mentoring relationships—not as an add-on feature of mentorship but rather an essential aspect of mentors’ support and role. As demonstrated from various perspectives, a culture of wellbeing in schools has multiple benefits for people and organizational cultures, including teacher and leader preparation. Readers, especially those concerned with the flourishing of schools in a pandemic world, will walk away better prepared to make mentoring work." — Carol A. Mullen, Virginia Tech "Effectively marshalled by Kutsyuruba and Kochan, respected international authorities on mentoring, the authors provide a wealth of examples and guidance on much-needed means of promoting wellbeing and human flourishing in schools. Given the vast number of threats and impediments to the wellbeing of students, trainee teachers, established teachers, and principals worldwide, this work is extremely timely. Arguably, it should be compulsory reading for school principals, mentors, teacher educators, mentor trainers, education researchers in these spaces, and – perhaps more importantly – anyone who holds public office and makes or has the capacity to influence decisions which impact the work of school teachers and principals." — Andrew J. Hobson, University of Brighton, UK

Most educators will agree that they would love to see each student and staff member in schools flourish. Furthermore, it would be great to see entire communities experience the transformative power of circumstances that feature happy and vibrant learning. However, what does it mean to experience flourishing in schools? What is the role of positive leadership in this process? What can we learn from inquiring into the positive emotional and social aspects of the work of school leaders? Building on our research on flourishing in schools, this book highlights the stories and perspectives of educators and school leaders at all levels of the school system and demonstrate the intricacies of how positive leadership contributes to well-being in schools and encourages flourishing in these schools. This book aligns with a growing shift in psychology and organizational studies to frame research using phenomena and constructs such as resilience, compassion, hope, efficacy, self-determination and meaningfulness at work and in other areas of life. Research findings from the disciplines of both positive psychology and positive organization studies bring these positive research intelligences into the field of education to study what works in school leadership practices, what goes well, what supports growth, and what brings vitality to people in school organizations. Research in positive psychology contends that attending to the strengths, positive outlooks, habits and mental models, as opposed to a deficit-oriented perspective, is beneficial to increasing subjective wellbeing, by increasing resilience, vitality, and happiness and decreasing stress, anxiety, and depression. How we imagine leading, teaching and learning in schools are implicated in these understandings and help us to contemplate the benefits of focus positive leadership in school organizations. Powerful insights into human inquiry and positive psychology are gained through qualitative study and most of the chapters of this book are grounded in such research. Importantly, chapters in this book provide a varied repertoire of answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How does positive leadership leverage what works well to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute, encourage wellbeing for all and create school contexts of flourishing? This edited collection provides many examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts in ways that encourage them to shift and grow through moving toward appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and, especially, leading in all school contexts.

This book challenges dominant thinking about early career teachers and their work. It offers an in-depth and critical analysis of policies concerning the work of early career teachers and how they are supported during this critical period, when they are highly vulnerable to leaving the profession. Moreover, the book provides examples from actual practice that illustrate how to help early career teachers make a successful transition into the profession. These practices promote early career teachers’ development and help the profession as a whole to capitalize on the new knowledge and skills that these teachers bring to their classrooms and their students. The book is divided into two main parts. Part 1 deals with the difficult to define process of retaining early career teachers, and its respective chapters consider this broad issue from an international perspective. They explore how policies and practices have an impact on what happens in schools, and what it means to be a teacher and to teach. In turn, Part 2 focuses on the need to reconsider the policies and practices that create the ‘problem’ of early career teachers, and offers alternative ways forward. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of the early career teacher retention issue, contributing to a greater understanding of how we can rethink the work of early career teachers so that they can more successfully transition into the profession.

While the action research community across Canada is a vibrant one, it remains scattered, dismissed as rootless and still unproven. This book illuminates action research as a vital and long-established Canadian perspective, taking stock of its use in education by a wide array of scholars and practitioners. Reflecting an inclusive range of viewpoints from twenty-two scholars across the nation, chapters show without question that action research - encompassing collaborative, iterative, and practice-based research - is a growing field in Canada. Authors bring a range of experiences that speak to the many facets of this movement. They discuss historical foundations, individual and large-scale projects dealing with a multitude of subject areas and educational practices, and participatory methods that speak to the discipline's capacity to engage with the pressing social issues of our time. A timely intervention that threads the field together and serves as both a reference and a guide to further work, The Future of Action Research in Education draws clear links between the past and future and maps bold new directions for this approach.