Professional Culture

Where Teachers Thrive is based on interview studies conducted in fourteen high-poverty, urban schools. It focuses on the context of teachers’ work, examining why some schools failed to make progress, while others achieved remarkable results. It explores...

Background/Context

Many strategies to improve failing urban schools rest on efforts to improve leadership within the school. Effective school-based leadership depends not only on the activities of the principal, but also on teachers’ efforts to address...

Teacher teams are increasingly common in urban schools. In this study, we an- alyze teachers’ responses to teams in six high-poverty schools. Teachers used two criteria to assess teams’ goodness of fit in meeting the demands of their work: whether their...

Background/Context: Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers’ ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers’ effectiveness across classrooms...

In "Counting on colleagues: New teachers encounter the professional cultures of their schools" by S. M. Kardos, S. M. Johnson, H. G. Peske, D. Kauffman, & E. Liu (Educational Administration Quarterly, April 2001), we use new entrants’ accounts to...

Using a sample of 374 randomly selected first- and second-year teachers in three states, this study examines new teachers’ experiences of official mentoring during their first year. Descriptive analyses reveal that experienced mentors are generally...

Background/Context: In order to develop effective strategies for retaining able and commit- ted teachers, it is important to understand how new teachers experience their work with their colleagues. A previous qualitative study conducted by the authors and...

In this article, the authors consider three sources of support for new teachers—hiring practices, relationships with colleagues, and curriculum—all found in earlier research to influence new teachers’ satisfaction with their work, their sense of success...