The purpose of this research was to examine the resilience building process in four novice secondary science teachers in order to understand how and why some novice science teachers remain in the profession while others choose to leave. The results of this study suggest that the interaction between stressors and protective factors constitute the primary force of the resilience process and stimulate responses to help counteract negative effects of stress. Underlying the success of the four novice teachers in this study is the notion that their resilience stems from their ability to revise protective factors in order to address changing stressors. Finally, it can be reasoned that resilience can be fostered in novice teachers as a means to encourage teacher retention.

The purpose of this article was to illustrate the characteristics, key features, and significant gaps in current Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) research by way of examples from several important domains, and to identify the kinds of research that are most needed to address the question posed in this special issue. The authors provided illustrations in three domains of ECTE: addressing the needs of young children with disabilities; understanding and working effectively with infants and toddlers; and building young children’s competence and interest in mathematics. They then identified five crosscutting research priorities, using examples from these three domains. They conclude by describing what is needed to create a supportive environment that produces—and implements—early childhood teacher education research.

This article presents a qualitative case study, which examined the relationship between conversations during formal collaborative experiences and the actual classroom practice of early childhood teachers in a district, Head Start, and university lab school. Three elements related to the development of communities of practice emerged from this study: (a) parallel processes that promoted the transfer of teacher talk into practices that enriched classroom environments; (b) administratively supported collective control of curriculum by teachers promotes a practice-based focus; and (c) use of protocols actively guides the content and process of teachers’ conversations. This study illustrates the importance of group routines and intentions, collective ownership of curriculum, and their role in the development of productive parallel processes.

This article reports on the evaluation of a model for assessment of content knowledge used by researchers in the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Project for Teachers of Science. These assessment strategy and scoring methodology result in scores for each teacher about the quality of their understanding of each Big Idea before and after PD. The compilation of scores by teacher facilitates assessment of the strength of teachers’ incoming knowledge and changes in their knowledge both in terms of number of Big Ideas and the clarity, accuracy, and completeness of that use. The assessment strategy offers advantages and limitations of this method.

In this article, the author argues that there is a lack of research into the role of the facilitator of discussions of video for professional development. A key purpose of this article is to expose aspects of the role of the facilitator of teacher learning, not reported in previous research in the use of video. Hence, the author documents research he undertook into the use of video as a tool for teacher learning. In analysing empirical data from one school, he suggests five key aspects or decision points in working with teachers on video: selecting a video clip, setting up the discussion norms, re-watching the video, moving to interpretation, and metacommenting. The author argues that having presented key aspects of the role of the facilitator of video use, a further look at the detail of the data from discussions serves to highlight some of the complexities involved in just one of the categories.

The study outlined in this article used the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) to explore the views of scientists held by preservice students in science methods classes at both the elementary and secondary levels. The findings revealed that the students with greater previous science experience at both the secondary and post-secondary level would create visual representations of scientist that were significantly less stereotypical than representations created by students with lesser previous science experience. However, results indicated statistically significant differences in stereotypical components of representations of scientists depending on preservice teachers’ program and previous science experiences.

In this longitudinal study, the authors investigate changes in teachers’ mathematics knowledge during a mathematics content course focused on real-world applications and during a content/pedagogy hybrid course designed specifically for elementary teachers. The authors used two popular assessments in the United States: (1) Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) and (2) Diagnostic Teacher Assessments in Mathematics and Science (DTAMS). The findings reveal that teachers made large gains on both measures. However, the LMT better captured gains made during the hybrid course, whereas DTAMS better detected gains during the mathematics course. Furthermore, the patterns of change differed during the two courses, with the LMT scores increasing during the hybrid course only and the DTAMS scores increasing over the two courses.