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While school leaders have commonly functioned as school managers, the urgency for improving learning outcomes highlights the need for school leaders to function more as instructional leaders. However, a number of barriers exist in exercising instructional leadership in the developing country context. School leaders often lack capacity for instructional leadership and operate under significant constraints, such as chronic shortage of materials, operating funds, and staff development resources. Knowledge about cultural and organizational factors influencing school leadership behaviors can inform conditions for strengthening instructional leadership. This discussion essay provides a framework for expanding comparative and international inquiry into the challenges of instructional leadership in terms of the principal–agent problem, school leader sense of self-efficacy, and the integration of teacher incentives.

Purpose – To provide a model for mentoring teachers through the process of improving instruction and intervention.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter describes the Gradual Increase of Responsibility model for coaching, an adaptation of Pearson and Gallagher's (1983) Gradual Release of Responsibility model that can be used by coaches as they support teachers in a clinic or school setting.

Findings – Content describes stages of the coaching model that provide less scaffolding as teachers gain confidence and competence. These stages include modeling, recommending, questioning, affirming, and praising.

Research limitations/implications – The Gradual Increase of Responsibility (GIR) model provides a process that coaches can follow to support instructional improvement. GIR requires that coaches have instructional expertise; it provides them with a guide for their work with teachers to incorporate effective practices.

Practical implications – The GIR model can be applied by coaches in both clinical and school settings, with teachers who instruct students at both elementary and secondary levels.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter provides examples for each stage of the GIR process, clearing indicating how coaches can guide teachers to take on increased responsibility for strong, intentional instruction and intervention.

COVID-19’s influence on the teaching profession will be felt for many years as teachers faced experiences that they have never encountered. The pandemic forced already taxed teachers to assume additional responsibilities, many of which they were not prepared to deal with. The result was an exodus of teachers from the profession, and those who remained reported challenges that impacted their personal and professional lives. The authors describe the effects on teachers and the impact that this had on them, including reasons why many departed from teaching. In closing, the authors offer recommendations to teacher preparation programs, districts, and schools.

In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and international reports prove that this is a difficult aim to achieve purpose. Training both preservice and in-service teachers is vitally important for technology to become part of everyday school life. But to achieve this, we must move away from the techno-centric focus of technology. This chapter analyzes the importance of focusing on implementing technologies in the learning activities that teacher-trainers design to prepare preservice teachers. We describe seven types of activities: assimilative, informative management, applicative, communicative, productive, experiential, and evaluation. All of these technology-based learning activities, organized in learning sequences, potentially help teachers to come to terms with technological knowledge in their pedagogical content area.

Teachers in the initial stages of their career need support. The quality of their development will depend strongly on the kind of support that is given to them during induction. In this chapter, the author explains how the induction years need to be seen as a distinctive part of the teacher education continuum, building on initial teacher education (ITE) and feeding into continuing professional development (CPD). The University of Malta's Faculty of Education proposed national strategy for induction of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) stresses the need for an effective design of induction programs in terms of the type of activities, the involvement of teacher education institutions and the role of the mentor – all of which can vary, depending on the learning needs of the NQT involved. Such programs will ensure that the support provided creates opportunities to relate back to initial teacher education and to prepare teachers for career-long continuing professional development. The aim of this discussion is to evaluate the current state of professional opportunities available for beginning teachers in Malta, and to discuss an effective approach which facilitates experienced teachers to build their capacities to play a key role, through mentoring, in their new colleagues' professional learning journey.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the challenges of instructional leadership in prekindergarten (PK) programs in the context of small and mid-sized school districts. We first explore issues that characterize current PK education including the need for content standards and curriculum, Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP), Mathematics Pedagogical Content Knowledge, and addressing mathematics anxiety and teacher-efficacy. We then turn to instructional leadership for PK education and the challenges that leader preparation and district program structures cause for instructional leadership. Often instructional experts have limited exposure to PK classrooms housed in traditional elementary buildings. Additionally, elementary principals are typically ill-prepared with the knowledge needed to support and develop teacher MPCK and effective learning contexts in PK classrooms. Typical preparation and professional development programs offer limited support for building principals as PK instructional leaders. Implications for building principals include the need to engage professional communities, utilize collaborative processes such as team observations, and leverage the collective efficacy and expertise of PK educators in their schools and districts.

Despite the existence of legislation and policy, the inclusion of students with special needs remains a challenge for teachers when research-based pedagogies and collaboration are not translated into practice. Given emerging Indexes for inclusion, perhaps we should be attending to measuring school and classroom indicators of inclusive education to allow for professional development for teachers in an empirical and guided manner. Following a brief introduction to the importance of inclusive practice in schools, this chapter will address teacher use of research-based pedagogies and curriculum differentiation required to enhance success with students in schools; teachers’ capacity to communicate about learning using professional language and collaborative problem-solving processes; teachers’ sense of self-efficacy when working with students who have special needs; and translation of these research-based skills into actual classroom practice.

For half a century, psychologist Albert Bandura has worked to advance a cognitive interactional model of human functioning that emphasizes the role of cognitive and symbolic representations as central processes in human adaptation and change. In his seminal 1977 publication, Bandura emphasized that these representations – visualized actions and outcomes stemming from reflective thought – form the basis from which individuals assess their personal efficacy. An efficacy belief, he contended, is the “conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes” one desires (p. 193). Efficacy beliefs serve as the primary means by which people are able to exercise a measure of control over their lives. During the next two decades, Bandura (1986, 1997) advanced his social cognitive theory, in which people are viewed as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating rather than as solely reactive organisms, products of environmental or concealed inner influences. From this agentic perspective, people are seen as contributors to their life circumstances, not just recipients of them. In this way, people are “partial architects of their own destinies” (Bandura, 1997, p. 8).

Purpose – To help teacher educators understand how to more fully prepare pre-service teachers (PSTs) for meaningful and effective instruction with multimodal texts and the underlying technologies.

Design – This mixed methods investigation employed designed-based research in that as the authors observed and gathered data on PSTs’ outcomes within the context of a literacy methods course, the authors also engaged in an iterative process of collaborative design to develop a sustainable instructional model across three academic semesters with three cohorts of PSTs. The authors analyzed pre- and post-PST surveys measuring their knowledge of, disposition toward, and self-efficacy with technology and technology in teaching as well their intent to use technology in their future teaching. The authors also coded and analyzed PST lesson plans completed across each semester for instances of meaningful integration of multimodal texts and the underlying technology, and sound literacy instruction. Finally, the authors closely examined differences in how the course was shaped and “reshaped” across all three iterations and noted any differences in PST outcomes related to these shifts.

Findings – Overall findings suggest that enrollment in the literacy methods course improved both PSTs’ self-efficacy and knowledge about teaching with technology while also supporting PSTs’ ability to develop sound literacy instructional plans. Moreover, strategic positioning of multimodal texts and technology, in which integration is seamless, can help PSTs meaningfully and effectively weave multimodal text sets into their literacy lesson plans.

Practical Implications – This chapter contributes to the literature on integrating multimodal texts and the underlying technologies into PST programs by providing explicit, research-based recommendations for how teacher educators can meaningfully and seamlessly infuse multimodal text sets into core curricula and instructional practices.