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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The first year of teaching has profound implications for career length, job satisfaction, and teacher effectiveness. Establishing relationships with multiple colleagues has been found to help new teachers improve their practice and create a sense of identity within their schools and within the profession. Lack of physical proximity among teachers, however, has been shown to inhibit the formation of these professional relationships. Despite these findings, research involving a close examination of how socio-physical arrangement of space can foster or hinder a sense of professional community is sparse, particularly with relation to new teachers. Hence, the purpose of this study was to better understand how first-year teachers’ interactions with their colleagues influenced the novices’ establishment within their school communities, their conceptions of teaching, their sense of place and identities as teachers, and the learning that occurs over the course of the first year. Using interviews and observations as primary sources of data, and supplementingthese with several other sources such as video tours, interaction logs, and relational maps, this study examined the interactions of three first-year teachers (in the same middle school) with their colleagues, while paying specific attention to the role of the spatial structures of the school in shaping these interactions. Ultimately, this study found that the arrangements of school structures, including space, time, and task, as well as the interrelatedness of these structures, influenced the frequency and nature of the novices’ interactions with their colleagues, thus playing a crucial role in their learning, identities, and conceptions of teaching as a collaborative versus independent endeavor. This dissertation concludes with implications for practice and research aimed at arranging these structures so as to make the first years of teaching more constructive and more satisfying for novice educators.

The purpose of this thesis was to create an Online Mentoring website that would benefit teachers by helping them to feel more confident and efficient through their first couple of years teaching. Its focus is to provide new teachers access to all information involving its processes, procedures and expectations within a specific school site.

University of Macau / Faculty of Education

This dissertation focused on the study of the Spanish academic language proficiency of novice bilingual teachers during the act of teaching mathematics in elementary grades. Four first year teachers in a large urban school district in central Texas participated in the study. At the time of the study two participants were fully certified and had attended four-year teacher preparation programs. The additional participants had completed all certification requirements including content examinations and the Texas Oral Proficiency Test (TOPT); they were completing their certification requirements through alternative certification programs. The study sought to identify the moments in their teaching of mathematics in Spanish when their instruction broke down, i.e. when they appeared unable to communicate ideas to students, and the reasons for these breakdowns. Findings revealed that the teachers in the study demonstrated linguistic and/or pedagogical breakdowns and that certain factors influenced their knowledge and language competencies. Linguistic breakdowns were manifested when teachers switched to English, used repetitive language when teaching, or provided limited academic language. Pedagogical breakdowns were identified as a lack of: student talk or discussion, effective teacher questioning, or diverse presentation of content. Overall, the teachers struggled with limited language in Spanish and limited pedagogical reasoning skills while teaching mathematical concepts to their students. These limitations were exacerbated by the pressures of high stakes testing and countered by the fact that all four teachers shared linguistic and cultural affiliation with their students. This collective case study was conducted from within a constructivist theoretical framework focusing on theories of academic language, communicative competence, and Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective of learning. Recommendations for future training and practice of bilingual teachers are provided specifically on the importance of Spanish language proficiency of this group of educators. / text

Cette recherche vise à comparer des enseignants novices en situation de formation et des enseignants "experts" que sont les maîtres de stages. L'observation et la comparaison des méthodes didactiques utilisées dans l'enseignement technique et dans l'enseignement général, mais aussi dans des disciplines différentes (biologie, chimie, français, histoire) nous a permis de mettre en évidence l'impact de la formation initiale sur les comportements des enseignants novices. / Doctorat en sciences de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished