A STUDY INVESTIGATING WHAT DIFFERENT SUBGROUPS OF EDUCATIONAL STAKEHOLDERS EACH BELIEVES IS EFFECTIVE IN NEW TEACHER INDUCTION WITH AN OVERVIEW OF THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES AMONG AND BETWEEN THESE GROUPS

A STUDY OF WHAT DIFFERENT SUBGROUPS OF EDUCATIONALSTAKEHOLDERS EACH BELIEVES IS EFFECTIVE IN NEW TEACHER INDUCTION WITH AN OVERVIEW OF THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES AMONG AND BETWEEN THESE GROUPSDaniel C. Lujetic, Ed.DUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2007In any profession, there is always a period where new employees must learn to integrate themselves into their jobs and to become successful at what they do. However, newly hired teachers often are given the most difficult teaching assignments and left to "sink or swim" without the type of help provided by most other professions (e.g. American Federation of Teachers, 2000; Darling-Hamilton, 1996; U.S. Department of Education, 1998; Bartell, 2005; Grossman & Thompson, 2004; ERIC Clearinghouse on Teacher Education, 1999). The beginning teacher faces performing several duties while at the same time trying to learn those duties (Wong & Wong, 2001). This is all detrimental to the process of teaching and learning, ultimately affecting student achievement.Improving student learning, therefore, relies on improving teaching (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), and the goal of having a systematically planned program teacher induction should be to help new teachers not just survive, but to succeed and thrive (Bartell, 2005). Improving teaching for those new to the profession is thus necessary to maximize students' learning, knowing that the integration period for new teachers is crucial. Research shows that beginning teachers often struggle in their first few years due to a lack of usefulness of new teacher induction programs (U.S. Department of Education, 2000), even though the early years of a teacher's career are the most formative, in which they establish patterns and practices that form the bases for the rest of their careers (Bartell, 2005). Sound induction programs are necessary, wherein new teachers are assessed and supported as they grow toward becoming expert classroom teachers (Berry, Hopkins-Thompson, & Hoke, 2002). Typically, veteran school personnel design and implement these induction programs. Therefore, there appears to possibly be a disjunction between what veteran administrators and teachers design for new teacher inductions versus what new teachers really need