The recruitment and retention of teachers demand attention with estimates of two million new teachers needed in the next decade. Hiring under qualified teachers necessitates adequate induction programs. Development of a recommendation for a teacher induction program comprises the purpose of the study. The recommended induction and support program addresses the activities perceived as valuable by both mentors and mentees. The researcher describes the mentor programs currently in place in Region XI in northern Texas by surveying the mentors and mentees; of particular relevance is a determination and description of the program model in place. Data sources include the literature review and information obtained from Region XI mentors/mentees. Data shows the model in Region XI is primarily a colleague model. Mentors and mentees are matched for grade level, content area and physical proximity. Three of the most frequently occurring activities are in the category emotional support, three in logistical concerns, two in systems information, one in student management, and one in instructional support. Mentees believe those activities associated with classroom management and organization and developing confidence and self-esteem are most important. Mentors concur. Specific recommendations for structuring a comprehensive beginning teacher induction and support program include reexamining the program currently in use, prioritizing timing of implementation, articulating campus mentoring goals, adhering to logistical areas of concern, providing training for the mentors in a program of psychological support that focuses on the psychological needs of the beginning teacher, providing time within the day, and evaluating current programs at the end of each year using those beginning teachers involved.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

Teacher recruitment and retention challenges facing urban school contexts provided the impetus for this study. High percentages of historically marginalized students, plagued by high poverty rates and low academic performance, as well as substandard facilities and inadequate material resources, serve as causative factors inhibiting recruitment and retention of credentialed teachers in urban schools (Education Commission of the States [ECS], 1999; Guarino et al., 2006; Horng, 2009; USDOE, 2003; 2004; Wirt et al, 2004). Schools and districts attempt to meet chronic teacher shortages in hard-to-staff urban schools by creating innovative teacher preparation schemes, such as the Urban Teaching Academy (UTA). This study focuses on teacher identity formation and prospective efficacy beliefs among a group of students enrolled in UTA. The research questions were examined using interpretive phenomenological inquiry (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) through case study methodology (Yin, 2009). Findings show that the precollegiate student teachers in this study made meaning primarily from a student perspective, thus adhering to prototypical images of teaching characterized by identity markers. Salient components of definitions of teacher identity for precollegiate student teachers are Self and Care. Less relevant components for precollegiate student teachers were Emotion and Context. These components appear most influenced by the temporal distance between the precollegiate Urban Teaching Academy and actual teaching experiences during internship/practicum and subsequent teaching in a professional capacity, suggesting a need to determine whether it is possible for precollegiate student teachers to meet the emotional and contextual demands of teaching at such an early stage. Additionally, this study proposes to extend on the teacher efficacy construct by offering a model for prospective efficacy as it pertains to individuals in teacher preparation at the precollegiate and preservice levels. This model contends that beginning with the self as influenced by personal, social, cultural, historical and political knowledge sources, precollegiate student teachers begin to develop an epistemological stance towards teaching. Over time, precollegiate student teachers build identity capital grounded in the skills, knowledge and dispositions gained through access to varied knowledge sources, which develop as precollegiate student teachers learn theoretical principals of teaching, obtain and learn from performance information, and combine the theory and practice into an epistemological framework that provides impetus for ongoing synergy between theoretical and practical experiences. The broader the base of identity capital from which the precollegiate student teacher draws, the greater the likelihood that she will develop prospective efficacy, or the belief that she will be capable of fulfilling teaching roles and responsibilities in the future. This study informs the literature on precollegiate and preservice teacher identity and extends the literature on teacher efficacy.

International teacher migration has emerged as one of the key policy challenges confronting many countries, particularly in Southern Africa, with Botswana, South Africa and Zambia experiencing variable degrees of the cross-border movement of teachers. The aim of this research was to develop a strategy for managing teacher migration in Southern Africa, and balancing the right of individual teachers to migrate internationally, while protecting the integrity of vulnerable education systems and their human resources. The research comprised a literature review and an empirical study based on a mixed-methods research design combining the quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The literature study examined international teacher migration, including its main concepts, theories, causes and effects, while the empirical study assessed the statistical scope of teacher migration in Southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa and Zambia), its causes, effects, and management. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data from education officials, school principals and migrant teachers, while personal in-depth interviews were used to elicit complementary qualitative data from some experts on migration, education officials, teacher union leaders, school principals and migrant teachers. The results of the study revealed that teacher migration statistics and data were generally patchy and incomplete in Southern Africa; that international teacher migration in the region was driven by three main causes related to economic, political and salary conditions; and that teacher migration had both positive and negative effects on the education systems of Southern African countries, migrant teachers and their families. The findings further revealed that improving the management of teacher migration in Southern Africa required a systematic and coordinated approach involving sending and receiving countries, with reference to a common policy and legal framework supported by comprehensive teacher migration data. In this regard, and based on the identification of key principles and guidelines for teacher migration management, a model is proposed for the viable management of teacher migration in the Southern African region. / Educational Leadership and Management / D. Ed. (Education Management)

International teacher migration has emerged as one of the key policy challenges confronting many countries, particularly in Southern Africa, with Botswana, South Africa and Zambia experiencing variable degrees of the cross-border movement of teachers. The aim of this research was to develop a strategy for managing teacher migration in Southern Africa, and balancing the right of individual teachers to migrate internationally, while protecting the integrity of vulnerable education systems and their human resources. The research comprised a literature review and an empirical study based on a mixed-methods research design combining the quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The literature study examined international teacher migration, including its main concepts, theories, causes and effects, while the empirical study assessed the statistical scope of teacher migration in Southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa and Zambia), its causes, effects, and management. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data from education officials, school principals and migrant teachers, while personal in-depth interviews were used to elicit complementary qualitative data from some experts on migration, education officials, teacher union leaders, school principals and migrant teachers. The results of the study revealed that teacher migration statistics and data were generally patchy and incomplete in Southern Africa; that international teacher migration in the region was driven by three main causes related to economic, political and salary conditions; and that teacher migration had both positive and negative effects on the education systems of Southern African countries, migrant teachers and their families. The findings further revealed that improving the management of teacher migration in Southern Africa required a systematic and coordinated approach involving sending and receiving countries, with reference to a common policy and legal framework supported by comprehensive teacher migration data. In this regard, and based on the identification of key principles and guidelines for teacher migration management, a model is proposed for the viable management of teacher migration in the Southern African region. / Educational Leadership and Management / D. Ed. (Education Management)

This investigation focused on identifying model foundational strategies to assist Canton Public School District (CPSD) officials in recruiting new teachers, successfully hiring them, and then retaining them the district. Located within the boundaries of the city of Canton, Mississippi, CSPD is geographically located in the central portion of the state. The district consists of 1 high school, 2 middle schools, 4 elementary schools and Canton Education Services Center. CSPD is continually affected by an ever-increasing teacher shortage because new teachers tend to leave the district after they are hired. More than 50% of new teachers leave their teaching positions in the district’s schools within 5 years. The investigation utilized published literature and other archival data (e.g., scholarly papers presented at conferences) accessible to the public in the form of books, chapters in published books, journal articles, and scholarly papers presented at learned societies and associations. Two research questions guided the investigation. The first research question asked: What does the published literature and related archival data (e.g., available scholarly papers retrievable from sources such as colleges, universities, foundations, conferences, etc.) accessible to the public reveal about recruiting, hiring, and retaining teachers? Overall, the material collected and analyzed yielded abundant information. Much of the available information proved valuable because the material focused attention the “how-to-do-it” aspects of recruiting, hiring, and retaining quality new teachers. The second research question asked: Will information gleamed from an analysis of the published literature and other archival data (e.g., unpublished scholarly papers) lead to the development of foundational strategies for assisting school district officials in recruiting, hiring, and retaining new teachers for CPSD? It was possible to develop a model holding potential for improving teacher recruitment, hiring, and retention at CPSD. The model that was developed features seven foundational strategies that if implemented, hold potential for improving teacher recruitment, hiring, and retention at CPSD. The seven strategies are: (1) identify the vacancy and write the job description, (2) announce and advertise the teacher vacancy, (3) develop a customized application form, (4) paper screening process, (5) interviewing process, (6) salary and benefit package, and (7) induction and mentoring.