Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

Doctoral students’ role as mentees is well documented in studies on faculty–student mentorship in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM); however, they also frequently serve as mentors to earlier-stage (e.g., undergraduate) students. To date, studies have not yet substantively investigated how the mentoring support doctoral students receive from past and present mentors may motivate them to serve in a similar role.

Focusing within the field of informatics, this qualitative study examined how past and present mentors shaped doctoral students’ understanding of their possible pathways to and through doctoral education and their motivations to be mentors. We asked: (1) How do informatics doctoral students make meaning of their past and present mentors as possibility models or anti-mentors in their educational pathways?, and (2) What aspects of relationships with past and present possibility models or anti-mentors shape informatics doctoral students’ motivations to become mentors?

Guided by the theoretical perspectives of graduate socialization and possible selves, we used a critical constructivist paradigm with narrative inquiry to make meaning of participants’ past, present, and future development as mentors. The data for this study included adapted education journey maps and two semistructured 60- to 75-minute interviews with 10 informatics doctoral students, with each data source exploring how past and present mentors serve as possibility models or anti-mentors in doctoral students’ trajectories as mentees and emerging mentors. We then applied a three-part analytic process to establish organizational, theoretical, and substantive categorizations and facilitate our (re)storying process of participants’ narratives.

We offer three overarching findings discussing how, as participants received mentorship and conceptualized their motivations to provide support as mentors, they reflected on: (1) clarifying mentoring philosophies and values, (2) redefining potential pathways as mentees and mentors, and (3) understanding stage-ahead mentoring as fundamental to doctoral student training. By positioning doctoral students as mentors rather than only mentees, this study advances our understanding of the roots and potential consequences of mentorship in doctoral education, thereby informing how the next generation of mentors is trained.

As secondary English language arts (ELA) classrooms become increasingly linguistically diverse, concerns persist about teachers’ preparedness to provide rigorous and equitable instruction in multilingual classrooms. Multicultural teaching self-efficacy (MTSE) has been associated with diversity-responsive teaching practices. However, little is known about how MTSE relates to instructional practices in linguistically diverse secondary ELA classrooms or whether these relationships vary across levels of linguistic diversity.

This study examines the relationship between secondary ELA teachers’ MTSE and three dimensions of instructional practice: classroom management, instructional clarity, and cognitive activation. It also investigates whether these relationships vary according to the level of classroom linguistic diversity.

This study used data from the 2018 U.S. Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), drawing on a nationally representative sample of 364 secondary ELA teachers. Survey-weighted multivariable regression analyses were conducted to examine associations between MTSE and instructional practices and to test whether classroom linguistic diversity moderated these relationships.

MTSE was not directly associated with classroom management, instructional clarity, or cognitive activation. However, classroom linguistic diversity moderated several of these relationships. Teachers in multilingual classrooms reported lower levels of instructional clarity and cognitive activation overall, yet those with higher MTSE reported greater use of both practices. These findings highlight the importance of MTSE in sustaining rigorous and equitable instruction in linguistically diverse ELA classrooms.

Technology and the tech industry have gained increasing power in many societies over the past half century. In Israel, like other countries in the Global North, the public education system has experienced a shift toward enterprise culture, with policymakers and educators jointly collaborating in idealizing the Israeli high-tech sector.

In light of the growing dominance of tech ideology in the Israeli education system, the study explores how dominant views of the tech industry may influence teachers’ perceptions of the industry and tech ideology’s role in education. We were particularly interested in exploring how a host of factors, including teachers’ previous professional experience in the tech industry (or lack thereof) and the content area they teach, shape their perspectives on the involvement of the tech industry in Israeli public education.

Our data consists of interviews with 22 Israeli high school teachers. The participants were purposively chosen to include two groups of teachers who differ in their professional experience and background: teachers who joined the profession following substantial experience in the tech industry and teachers who joined the teaching profession early on and evolved solely through its ranks.

Findings suggest that (1) teachers both admire and resist tech ideology and its impact on schools, and (2) their attitudes toward the tech industry relate to their educational aims, highlighting the significance of tech involvement and its hegemonic impact on the future of teachers and public education. The discussion employs institutional isomorphism to illustrate how the education system might imitate the tech industry, identifying discursive and normative conditions under which institutional educational change may be legitimized or resisted.

Federal and state reforms have expanded accountability systems for school districts, schools, and teachers. However, there is little evidence that the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems relying on measures of student learning and measures of teaching practice, with differentiated performance categories and rewards and sanctions, have had broad positive influences on teaching practice and student learning.

We seek to contribute to an understanding of the modest influence of teacher evaluation systems by focusing on the targets of the policies—teachers—and how they experience the evaluation systems. Drawing on principal-agent theory and control-value theory, each of which suggests that teacher control over their performance evaluations influences their behavioral responses to them, we develop a taxonomy of teachers’ narratives of their subjective control of their evaluations.

We interviewed 141 New York City teachers working in 27 traditional elementary, middle, and high schools in the 2015–16 school year, asking about their experiences with Advance, the New York City annual teacher evaluation system. We developed a thematic analysis system for coding and analyzing the interviews that began with a set of categories reflective of the larger project’s research questions and prior research on performance evaluation in general and teacher evaluation in particular. All told, we coded 4,077 excerpts from the 141 teacher interviews, an average of about 29 excerpts per interview.

Seventy-one percent of the teachers in our sample indicated that they had no control over some aspect of their teacher evaluation ratings. Teachers noted three areas in their ratings that they deemed out of their control: other people’s behaviors, notably students, teachers, and the administrators observing and rating their classroom practice; the technology of teacher evaluation, especially the features of observation rubrics and student assessments, and for some teachers, statistical models; and the broader social context of the school, particularly the resources available to support teachers and students and the uncertainties of students’ home lives. A small number of teachers noted their control over their teaching practices and control over their own thoughts and behaviors.

This study was situated in New York City at a time when many teachers believed the teacher evaluation system was designed to be punitive. Under these circumstances, teachers’ responses to the evaluation system hinge on their trust in school leadership and their perceptions of how much voice they have in the design and implementation of the system. This trust is enhanced when teachers have confidence that principals are able to observe their practice accurately and consistently.