Early Career Teachers in Higher Education explores the experiences of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) through 13 personal teaching journeys from academics working across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and South America. This edited volume contains the subjective narrative of each contributor's entry into academia, their pedagogic practice and the development of their multiple teaching identities. Their personal narratives and testimonies presented here will provide a valuable resource for ECTs and academics around the world as they begin teaching in higher education. In addition, this edited book highlights contemporary issues, such as precarity, casualisation, fragmentation of academic responsibilities and intersectionality, that shape contemporary ECT workloads.

Teachers in their first few years of their teaching career require high quality, structured support to begin the journey towards becoming experts. Establishing research-based best practices and working habits set up early career teachers for a fulfilling and successful career. The requirements of teachers are constantly changing, and teachers need to continually adapt their knowledge and practices to fit schools’ changing demographics. Having a toolbox of research-based best practices to draw upon can support early career teachers as they move from theory to practical application when the learning curve is the steepest. Strengthening the system of support includes increasing teachers’ influence over their day-to-day work and developing positive and supportive cultures of learning. Supporting Early Career Teachers With Research-Based Practices presents both theoretical and practical research to support the conceptual understanding of educational praxis for common areas with which early career educators may require additional expertise or support. This book is intended to be a valuable contribution to the body of literature in the field of education by supplying research-based teaching practices for modern education. Primary topics covered include professional learning, classroom management, student-teacher relationships, teaching diverse students and inclusive educational practices, and teacher self-care strategies. This book is a valuable reference tool for early career teachers of all subject areas and grade levels, school administrators, teacher mentors and guides, education faculty in higher education, educational researchers, curriculum developers, instructional facilitators, practicing teachers, pre-service teachers, professional development coordinators, teacher educators, researchers, academicians, and students interested in teaching practices and support for the early career teacher.

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.

This book focuses on sustaining communities of practice in primary and secondary schools in Australia and internationally for the professional learning of all teachers, and particularly, early career teachers. Informed by the communities of practice research of Wenger-Trayner, it shows what factors are conductive to the sustainability of communities of practice, drawing particularly on a case study of an Australian regional secondary school, and explores how it has sustained support particularly for early career teachers over a three-year period. The first chapters of the book provide longitudinal perspectives using qualitative data and include perspectives from a variety of stakeholders, including the principal, the professional learning coordinator and the early career teachers who have experienced the school’s Communities of practice over three or more years. It offers practical suggestions on how to implement and improve communities of practice in schools and highlights the increasing importance of online communities to support early career teachers. Policy-makers, school principals, teacher educators and teaching practitioners find the book useful for implementing and sustaining communities of practice in schools. Subsequent chapters explore the value of online communities, such as Twitter communities; the role of collegial support networks in supporting early career teachers in Flemish primary education; and professional learning in Northern Ireland pre- and in-service teacher networked communities.

This book provides an evidentiary basis for policy decisions regarding initial teacher education and beginning teaching and informs the design and delivery of teacher preparation programs. Based on a rigorous analysis of international literature and the policy context for teacher education globally, and assessing data generated through a longitudinal study conducted in Australia, it investigates the effectiveness of teacher education in preparing teachers for the variety of school settings in which they begin their teaching careers. Over four years, the Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE) project tracked roughly 5,000 recently graduated teachers and 1,000 school principals in Australia to capture workforce data and gauge graduate teachers’ and principals’ perceptions of their initial teacher education programs. This book offers a synthesis of the research findings and uses the SETE as a catalyst for innovative theorization of the effectiveness of teacher education.

Early Career Teachers in Higher Education explores the experiences of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) through 13 personal teaching journeys from academics working across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and South America. This edited volume contains the subjective narrative of each contributor's entry into academia, their pedagogic practice and the development of their multiple teaching identities. Their personal narratives and testimonies presented here will provide a valuable resource for ECTs and academics around the world as they begin teaching in higher education. In addition, this edited book highlights contemporary issues, such as precarity, casualisation, fragmentation of academic responsibilities and intersectionality, that shape contemporary ECT workloads.

This book addresses one of the most persistent issues confronting governments, educations systems and schools today: the attraction, preparation, and retention of early career teachers. It draws on the stories of sixty graduate teachers from Australia to identify the key barriers, interferences and obstacles to teacher resilience and what might be done about it. Based on these stories, five interrelated themes - policies and practices, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and relationships – provide a framework for dialogue around what kinds of conditions need to be created and sustained in order to promote early career teacher resilience. The book provides a set of resources – stories, discussion, comments, reflective questions and insights from the literature – to promote conversations among stakeholders rather than providing yet another ‘how to do’ list for improving the daily lives of early career teachers. Teaching is a complex, fragile and uncertain profession. It operates in an environment of unprecedented educational reforms designed to control, manage and manipulate pedagogical judgements. Teacher resilience must take account of both the context and circumstances of individual schools (especially those in economically disadvantaged communities) and the diversity of backgrounds and talents of early career teachers themselves. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required– cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities: teachers cannot do it alone. This book is written to generate conversations amongst early career teachers, teacher colleagues, school leaders, education administrators, academics and community leaders about the kinds of pedagogical and relational conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing.