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This chapter examines the teacher's role as supervisor of support staff (Teaching Assistants (TAs) in the UK, school paraprofessionals in the US) – a role for which there is typically little administrative or infrastructural support. Working from a UK perspective, the chapter draws on research from the UK and the US to address questions pertinent to the education systems of all countries which employ paraprofessionals: What types of behaviours do conscientious teachers engage in to provide effective supervision to paraprofessionals? How do paraprofessionals view the supervisory behaviours of their supervising teachers? Given the important role of paraprofessionals, the high levels of expertise required by their assigned roles, and the uneven provision for their professional development, the chapter also makes recommendations for building the teacher's supervisory role into the infrastructure of schools, rather than relying on its emergence as a discretionary behaviour.

It is vitally important that students have access to teachers who are effective and broadly representative of our society. Yet in urban areas such as New York City (NYC), many teachers lack experience or appropriate qualifications and there is a profound mismatch between the racial composition of the teacher workforce and the composition of students served. Paraprofessionals, individuals who work under the supervision of a teacher to provide instruction or other direct services to students, represent a significant pool of minority teacher candidates. In NYC, paraprofessionals employed by the Department of Education (DOE) may receive tuition support and release time as they pursue higher education. Analysis of the participation and success of NYC DOE paraprofessionals enrolled in The City University of New York (CUNY) sheds light on the potential for paraprofessionals to become teachers and diversify the teaching workforce.

Recent changes in legislation have generated discussions among educators throughout the United States. The NCLB Act and IDEIA added new requirements for schools, and raised some questions regarding the intersection of the two laws as they impact special education. Following are discussions of these laws and what they mean to rural school systems.

The user-centered approach to understanding information use and users has shaped research in library and information science (LIS). In a user-centered environment, catalogers are told to focus on users and adapt standards to meet users’ needs while following standards in order to be efficient in their jobs. This study describes three academic cataloging units as they negotiate both the demands to follow and adapt these standards to meet users’ needs. New institutional theory served as a framework for the study. The results suggest that standards and users are pressures that cataloging units negotiate in their jobs, along with demands for work efficiency and professional legitimacy. While negotiating these pressures, catalogers and cataloging units redefine their work jurisdiction and maintain legitimacy to remain relevant in a complex work environment. Understanding how catalogers negotiate the normative institutional pressures of standards and users leads to an understanding of the complex nature of work in areas that deal with issues of standards and users, shows how an area within a profession maintains legitimacy when the profession no longer values that work, and, finally, shows the limits of the user-centered focus in LIS practice.

Training, particularly in the form of comprehensive professional development, continues to be a need for paraeducators (also known as teacher assistants). Training needs begin with an initial set of knowledge and skills and is built based upon the paraeducator’s role with individual students and the educational settings. Standards or guidance documents are available from a few individual states within the United States, higher education systems, and professional organizations that serve individuals with exceptional needs and agencies. An international professional organization, Council for Exceptional Children [CEC] (2011), identified a common skill set that reinforces standards for defining curricula when providing training to paraeducators. Key to their ongoing professional development is the on-the-job coaching by the education professional (teacher), to support the application of skills into the inclusive setting. Various forms of professional development are available including online trainings in addition to face-to-face.

Increasing numbers of support staff are employed in schools to provide services for students identified as requiring extra support. The roles of these staff have changed as a result of a variety of factors, foremost the increased inclusion of students with disabilities in mainstream settings. Compounding this increase is a re-evaluation of roles of staff in schools, shortages of qualified special education teachers, an increasing requirement of teachers to complete large quantities of administrative tasks, including paperwork (Lee, 2003), and the use of support staff, particularly teacher assistants (TAs) to relieve some of the work of teachers (Webster et al., 2010). This chapter will examine these factors and explore the resulting changes in roles and considerations for teachers when working with support staff.

This ECEPD project implemented a professional development (PD) protocol within a large public school system. The PD was designed to provide support for both teachers and their instructional partners in implementation of two curricula designed to foster children's language, literacy, math competencies, and overall cognitive development. The specifics of the PD are outlined including its development, coaching strategies, training approaches, and coursework components.

Results of the evaluation of the project are also highlighted and discussed. Analyses indicated that teachers showed significant growth in relation to the implementation of the curriculums and the PD efforts of both the district and the intervention, with less-experienced teachers showing the highest levels of growth. In addition, results indicated a significant difference between the intervention and the control group teachers in their developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices, with intervention teachers indicating higher levels of developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices. The challenges to field work in a large and ever-changing school system are discussed, and recommendations for further PD are made.