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This instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) explores the benefits experienced by mentor teachers who mentored resident teachers in a year-long residency program.

The study was grounded by the Benefits of Being a Mentor conceptual framework, as defined by Ragins and Scandura (1999). The participating mentor teachers engaged in semi-structured interviews and a focus group. The data were analyzed through inductive and deductive data analysis techniques.

Using inductive and deductive data analysis techniques, three themes emerged on the benefits of being a mentor teacher: (1) extra support in the classroom, (2) professional learning and growth opportunities, and (3) investing in the future of education. The teachers’ perceived benefits were related to the connectedness of their personal and professional growth, the growth of the resident teachers and their students’ learning.

Mentor teachers play a vital role in teacher residency programs, as they are the primary influence on their resident teachers’ pedagogical praxis. In a residency program, mentor teachers support resident teachers’ sustained teaching experience by hosting them for one full academic year in their classrooms; therefore, exploring the benefits they receive from serving in this role is essential.

Most teacher preparation programs (TPP) provide little instruction on mitigating the stress-related consequences of teaching (Miller and Flint-Stipp, 2019). This study aims to provide empirical support for including a self-care unit in teacher preparation curricula to address the secondary trauma and stressors inherent to the teaching profession (Essential 2; NAPDS, 2021; Sutcher et al., 2019).

This investigation occurred in an elementary TPP at a private southeastern US university and spanned two years, utilizing a mixed methods approach.

Findings suggest that after experiencing a 5-week self-care unit, preservice teachers exhibited a statistically significant increase in well-being and a newfound recognition of the need to prioritize self-care for effective teaching, suggesting its potential effectiveness in reducing burnout and attrition.

While this study provided valuable insights into the implementation and impact of a self-care unit within the context of elementary education majors at a mid-sized private university in the USA, it is essential to acknowledge its limitations. One notable limitation is the relatively homogenous sample, primarily consisting of White female participants.

The implications of this study are critical for teacher education policy and practice, advocating for including self-care curricula to enhance teacher well-being and, by extension, prepare teachers with a skillset to support their career trajectory (Essential 3; NAPDS, 2021).

This recommendation underscores the collaborative efforts between TPPs and partnership schools to implement such initiatives effectively, representing a pivotal step toward better-preparing teachers to manage the demands of their profession while prioritizing their mental health (Essentials 4 & 5; NAPDS, 2021).

This study explores how one novice teacher navigated his first-year teaching sixth-grade social studies.

One-sixth grade novice teacher was observed during his unit on the Islamic Empire. The teacher was interviewed before the unit began to understand his approach to combating Islamophobia and interviewed again after the unit so he could reflect on the unit and discuss if he believed he had accomplished his original goal. Classroom artifacts (handouts, slide decks, etc.) were collected.

The findings highlight the various forces that impacted the decisions the teacher made in the classroom. Lack of support from administration and various colleagues left the teacher feeling overwhelmed and unable to accomplish his goals. While the teacher started the unit with a clear purpose for teaching against Islamophobia, he ultimately taught a unit where students memorized discrete pieces of information.

This study adds to previous research on the need for providing administrative support for novice teachers to be able to teach in ambitious ways by highlighting the numerous shortcomings.

The paper aims to address the increasing issue of teacher shortages and the lack of diversity in America’s educators. Highly diverse communities need ways to support community members interested in careers as teachers. This article explores one promising approach to reach and inspire high school students considering the teaching profession. Camp ExCEL (Exploring Careers in Education and Leadership) provided a pathway allowing rising high school seniors an opportunity to explore the teaching profession. This pathway utilized the Grow Your Own framework, recruiting students from a diverse community and providing them resources and information that would further efforts to become an educator within their community.

The current study examined outcomes from an education summer camp, using qualitative thematic analysis to reflexively interpret participants’ (n = 29) feelings and beliefs about effective teaching, culturally responsive teaching (CRT), project-based learning (PBL) and their camp experience. Data were collected using Google documents and surveys. The four connected themes that emerged were obstacles and barriers to teaching, qualities of an effective teacher, the impact of culturally responsive teaching and project-based learning on classrooms, and the importance of mentorships within education.

The paper provides insight about how an education camp can support high school students as they explore a career in education. Results suggest that focus on high-quality pedagogy can support student understanding of the career. Students also suggested their perception of effective teaching that includes acknowledging the needs of the whole student, modeling high-quality teaching practices and displaying positive professional dispositions.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to conduct and examine education camps further.

The paper includes implications for the development of other education camps, especially in areas with highly diverse populations.

This paper fulfills an identified need to increase the number of persons pursuing a career in education. The focus on a highly diverse community is also an area of need in education. This article details the description of an education camp and the curriculum used, along with findings from data collected during the first year.

Research in this field is becoming increasingly clear that a teacher residency program (TRP) has a strong potential for developing effective teachers in a teacher preparation context. There are specific features of a TRP that yield results in the development of teachers. However, there are often barriers to full implementation of a TRP that schools and university partnerships must consider and resolve. The purpose of this article is to disseminate the lessons we have learned and processes we have developed in navigating the barriers and complexities of shifting toward a TRP.

The university faculty members with a dual role as Professional Development School (PDS) liaisons examine, reflect on, and present their multiyear process of moving from an undergraduate traditional teacher preparation model to a teacher residency model.

In response to the barriers of funding, defining roles and responsibilities, and changes in leadership, we developed an undergraduate residency blueprint to navigate these challenges productively. One of the goals of this document is to provide clarity for all stakeholders as well as be a transparent solution for leadership transitions. The blueprint serves as a guide for the details of residency program design.

In movement toward a TRP, there are often barriers to full implementation that schools and university partnerships must consider and resolve. This article provides a model for partnerships seeking to navigate teacher residency work.

District-university partners increasingly rely on “grow-your-own” licensure programs to address teacher shortages. Because vacancies in special education represent a chronic issue, our district-university partnership developed LEAP – the Licensed Educators’ Accelerated Pathway, successfully preparing 26 paraprofessionals as special education teachers (SEs). We describe a model university-district partnership in which we collaborated to design and implement paraprofessionals’ SE licensure program.

In this general review, we describe a district-university partnership collaboration that resolved barriers experienced by paraprofessionals working toward licensure in special education (Essential #4, Reflection and Innovation). The specialized design and partnership solutions were grounded in SE preparation research literature.

25 (28 entered the program and 25 completed) paraprofessionals from one large urban and several regional districts completed special education licensure through LEAP. Slightly more than half of LEAP participants were Black or Hispanic (see Table 1), contributing to the diversification of SE workforce. University-district partnership was successful in designing and delivering a program that allowed participants: a) to remain employed, b) attend evening classes in their geographic region or online, c) complete all field experiences in sponsoring districts (Essential #2) and d) receive concierge advising from a “completion coach.” We describe solutions to barriers experienced by paraprofessionals and advocate for district-university collaboration to address chronic teacher shortages.

Limitations include lack of data on success of program completers during their first year of teaching as they began this work in Fall 2023. Further, because the participating district was large and urban, generalization of program details for small and rural districts is difficult.

Practical tips for developing grow-your-own special education licensure programs are providing. Detailed descriptions of barriers candidates experienced and ways the district-university partners resolved these issues are included. Programs like the one described has the potential to positively impact teacher pipeline issues.

The program described provided highly-trained teachers to fill chronic vacancies in special education in three participating districts/agencies. Because students receiving special education services are at risk for school failure and are disproportionately impacted by teacher turnover, addressing this area through grow-your-own licensure programs represents a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Further, upskilling diverse paraprofessionals to licensed teacher roles represent an economic boost, which they might not otherwise have achieved.

Available research literature signals alarm over persistent teacher shortages in hard-to-staff districts and lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, but few published accounts describe successful programs. Partner collaboration fostered a re-imagining of course formatting and delivery to accommodate adult learners, avoiding problems often reported with alternative programs.

Researcher agreed that job performance has a positive effect on productivity as well as an organisation’s efficiency. Thus, this study aims to investigate the impact of mindfulness skill, inclusive leadership (IL), employee work engagement and self-compassion on the overall job performance of secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. It then evaluates the mediating effect of employee work engagement between the relationships of mindfulness skill, IL and job performance, as well as the moderate effect of self-compassion between the relationships of mindfulness skill, IL and employee work engagement.

The sample comprised 263 teachers working from three secondary schools in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. The data was then analysed using Smart PLS version 4.0.9.

The results showed significant positive relationships between mindfulness skill and IL towards employee work engagement and between employee work engagement and job performance; meanwhile, there emerged a significant effect on the relationship between mindfulness skill and IL towards job performance. Furthermore, this research has confirmed that self-compassion did not moderate the relationship between mindfulness skill, IL and employee work engagement, but employee work engagement plays a mediating effect on the relationship between mindfulness skill, IL and job performance.

This research has helped to fill the literature gap by examining the mediating roles of employee work engagement and mediator role of self-compassion in the integrated relationship of multi-factor and job performance. Examining the mediating role of employee work engagement has helped to enhance the understanding of the underlying principle of the indirect influence of mindfulness skill, IL and job performance. The result of this research shows that self-compassion plays a vital role in influencing the employees’ work engagement. Hence, it is important that companies design human resource management policy that enables self-compassion to be used as a consideration psychological-related strategy when structing organisation or teams. It is also crucial for top management and policymakers to define and communicate the organisation’s operating principle, value and goals.

The main goal of this study is to determine the role of employee commitment in the relations between the compensation system and turnover intentions of employees in the Republic of Serbia, as well as to investigate whether there is a mediating effect of employee commitment in this relation.

The primary methodology implemented in the research was data gathering, obtaining theoretical research works on the proposed relations and empirical studies based on the PLS-SEM, analysed by IBM SPSS Statistics and SmartPLS data processing software. The data for the analysis was obtained from a total sample of 764 employees, collected in the Republic of Serbia via an online questionnaire.

The results indicated a positive statistically significant relationship between the formative construct (compensation system) and reflective construct (commitment), as well as a negative statistically significant relationship between the compensation system and reflective construct (turnover intentions). Employee commitment partially mediates the relationship between the compensation system and turnover intentions of employees.

The study was conducted in Serbia and is thus rooted in the specific national context which is characterized by high power distance and high uncertainty avoidance and more collectivistic society with feminine values more expressed. Most of the previous investigations related to the mentioned constructs were performed in companies from more developed countries, including Western Europe and the United States of America, whereas there has been no such research conducted in Serbia to date. The results portrayed a mismatch between the expected relations regarding the attitudes of employees to the rewards and the proposed national context. Modern companies in Serbia need to follow a modern reward mechanism to build stronger commitment and decrease turnover intentions. Moreover, in most earlier research works, compensation was examined in terms of satisfaction with rewards, while this study was based on questions related to perceptions of employees toward HR compensation practices (“The organization offers me”-type questions), not related to their satisfaction. Further, in the majority of previous research works, the compensation system was examined as a variable in combination with other HR processes (staffing, training and development, career development, employee relations, HR planning, communication, etc.), as a HPWP, while in this case the authors used only the practice of compensation (reward elements and employee performance evaluation) to investigate relations with commitment and turnover intentions.

This paper seeks to investigate the differences in the teachers’ professional development (TPD) by mentorship in workplace. The authors examined the role of mentorship in the PD of teachers and conducted a meta-analysis of pertinent empirical data.

Using data from over 2,900 individuals, 66 experiments and 12 countries, the authors presented a meta-analysis of the association between workplace mentorship and TPD.

The authors concluded that mentoring activities could boost the TPD to some extent. It contributes positively to the discipline of science and language, kindergarten, individual mentoring and curriculum research. In addition, the periodicity should not exceed 1 year.

The results of the meta-analysis are restricted to short-term mentorship activities, and the sample size is modest. Building upon the findings from the literature review and meta-analysis, the authors delineated a research agenda for prospective investigations. This includes an imperative for further exploration into the nexus between mentoring and the PD of educators.

Based on the available literature and meta-analysis findings, the authors developed a framework for the “Experts in the classroom” TPD pattern.

This is the first meta-analysis evaluating the association between mentorship and TPD.

Post-COVID-19, public K–12 schools are still facing the consequences of the years of interrupted learning. Schools serving minoritized students are particularly at risk for facing challenges with academics, behavior and student social emotional health. The university counseling programs are in positions to build capacity in urban schools while also supporting counselors-in-training through service-learning opportunities.

The following conceptual manuscript demonstrates how counselor education counseling programs and public schools can harness the capacity-building benefits of university–school partnerships. While prevalent in fields like special education, counselor educators have yet to heed the hall to participate in mutually beneficial partnership programs.

Using the multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and the components of the university–school partnerships, counselor educators and school stakeholders can work together to support student mental health, school staff well-being and counselor-in-training competence.

The benefits and opportunities within the university–school partnerships are well documented. However, few researchers have described a model to support partnerships between the university counseling programs and urban elementary schools. We provide a best practice model using the principles of university–school partnerships and a school’s existing MTSS framework.