The Fundamentals and Tasks of Building China’s Kindergarten Teacher Workforce During the 14th Five-Year Plan

In this article, we seek to theorize the role of the kindergarten teacher as an agency mobiliser for sustainability through keeping the concept of the child in play, ultimately envisioning the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. This implies a non-dialectical politics of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and teacher roles for sustainability. Comprising friction zones between actual and virtual multiplicities that replace discursive productions of educational policies with enfoldedness, relations between bodies and becomings. This changes the power, position and function of language in and for agency and change. Not through making the child a constructivist change-agent through language but through opening up the possibilities for teachers to explore relations between language and matter, nature and culture and what might be produced collectively and individually. We go via the concepts of agencement expanding on the concept of agency, and conceptual personae directing the becoming of the kindergarten teacher. Both concepts informed by the transformational pragmatics of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). The overarching contribution of this article is therefore political and pragmatic and concerns the constitution of subjectivity and transformative citizenships for sustainability in inter- and intra-generational perspectives.

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Looking at Our STEM Teacher Workforce: How to Model Self-Efficacy

Economic Development Quarterly ◽

10.1177/0891242420973758 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 089124242097375

Author(s):

Brandon Ofem ◽

Samuel J. Polizzi ◽

Gregory T. Rushton ◽

Michael Beeth ◽

Brock Couch ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Self Efficacy ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Teaching Experience ◽

The United States ◽

High Turnover ◽

Cognitive Approach ◽

Gender And Age ◽

Teacher Workforce ◽

And Mathematics ◽

Stem Teacher

There is currently a severe shortage of teachers in the U.S. workforce. The problem is especially acute among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers and exacerbated by high turnover among new teachers—those with less than 5 years of teaching experience. In this article, the authors investigate one piece of the puzzle. The authors model a social cognitive approach to understanding self-efficacy, a key precursor to job performance and retention. Their interactionist approach accounts for both demographic (i.e., gender and age) and relational variables (i.e., social networks). The authors test their ideas on a sample of 159 STEM teachers across five geographic regions in the United States. Their analysis reveals patterned differences in self-efficacy across gender that are contingent on the communities of practice in which the teachers are embedded. Together, their theory and findings highlight the value of taking a holistic, interactionist view in explaining STEM teacher self-efficacy.

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The use of Spanish by a monolingual kindergarten teacher to support English language learners

Language and Education ◽

10.1080/09500782.2015.1070860 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 22-42 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Luciana C. de Oliveira ◽

Alsu Gilmetdinova ◽

Carolina Pelaez-Morales

Keyword(s):

English Language Learners ◽

Language Learners ◽

English Language ◽

Kindergarten Teacher

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Education Policy

National Institute Economic Review ◽

10.1177/002795011523100105 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 231 ◽

pp. R36-R43 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Rebecca Allen

Keyword(s):

Education Policy ◽

Low Income ◽

Educational Outcomes ◽

Teacher Recruitment ◽

Traditional Curriculum ◽

Coalition Partner ◽

Low Income Families ◽

Teacher Workforce ◽

Education Markets

This article summarises the 2010–15 Coalition government's education policy, contrasting their attempts to liberalise education markets with the desire to impose a highly traditional curriculum. The government's quite radical reforms have not been easy to implement, taking place against severe budgetary constraints and a minority Coalition partner with ambitions to improve the educational outcomes of children from low income families. It could be argued that the reforms have been successfully implemented, and there is little prospect of wholesale reversal by any future government. However, their combative approach to reform leaves a demotivated teacher workforce, a possible impending teacher recruitment crisis as the economy recovers, and a tangled web of accountability structures that will need to be resolved.

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Changing the Education Workforce? The Relationships among Teacher Quality, Motivation, and Performance Pay

Teachers College Record ◽

10.1177/016146811711900403 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 119 (4) ◽

pp. 1-32

Author(s):

Daniel H. Bowen ◽

Jonathan N. Mills

Keyword(s):

Teacher Quality ◽

Financial Incentives ◽

Risk Preferences ◽

Value Added ◽

Performance Pay ◽

Teaching Profession ◽

Performance Based Pay ◽

Teacher Workforce ◽

And Performance ◽

K 12

Background/Context With a growing body of evidence to support the assertion that teacher quality is vital to producing better student outcomes, policymakers continue to seek solutions to attract and retain the best educators. Performance-based pay is a reform that has become popular in K–12 education over the last decade. This strategy potentially produces positive impacts on student achievement in two ways: better alignment of financial incentives with desired outcomes and improved the composition of the teacher workforce. While evaluations have primarily focused on the former result, there is little research on whether the longer-term implementation of these polices can attract more effective teachers. Purpose In this study we aim to provide evidence for potential long-term impacts that performance-based pay can have on the composition of the teacher workforce by addressing two questions: Does performance-based pay attract fundamentally different individuals, as measured by their risk preferences, to the teaching profession? Are stated preferences for a particular pay format correlated to measures of teacher quality? Research Design We apply methods from experimental economics and conduct surveys with 120 teachers from two school districts who have experienced performance pay. We compare the risk preferences of teachers hired under the two pay formats to test the hypothesis that performance-based pay attracts individuals with different characteristics to the profession. We also analyze teachers’ survey responses on their preferences for performance-based pay to determine their relationships to two measures of teacher quality: student test-score gains and principal evaluations. Conclusions/Recommendations We find mixed results regarding the ability of performance-based pay to alter the composition of the teacher workforce. Teachers hired with performance-based pay in place are no different from their colleagues. However, teachers claiming to seek employment in districts with performance-based pay in place appear significantly less risk averse. Surprisingly, additional analyses indicate that teachers’ value-added scores and performance evaluations do not predict a positive disposition towards merit pay. Thus, while these results indicate the possibility for performance-based pay to attract different individuals to teaching, they do not provide evidence that such change would necessarily improve the composition of the workforce. Policymakers should take this potential tradeoff into consideration when considering the expansion of performance pay policies.

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