Beginning teachers are confronted with many issues as they begin their teaching careers, issues, such as classroom management, individual differences, behavior problems, dealing with parents, and so on. Many beginning teachers take professional development seminars in an attempt to deal with these and other issues. Professional development seminars, however, may not address the specific issues faced by beginning teachers but rather focus on approaches that are more global. In this paper, we argue that the best approach to professional development is through a collaborative action research model. By extending the partnerships established between student teachers, mentor teachers and university supervisors during student teaching into the beginning teachers' career, many of the everyday problems can be confronted within a supportive network.Several recommendations are offered for beginning and maintaining productive CAR relationships.

Good teaching is creative teaching, yet there is little research focusing on creative teachers themselves. In this article we report a synthesis of 13 qualitative case studies and 2 quantitative studies of teachers who demonstrated everyday or local creativity in their work. Themes and categories were identified through constant comparison and interrelationships among themes were explored. Four themes are described: personal characteristics, community, process, and outcomes. Teachers' creative processes emerged from the interaction between their personal characteristics, including personal intelligences, motivation, values and the communities in which they worked and lived. These processes resulted in a wide variety of outcomes. The findings suggest that cooperation between teachers and administrators is essential for teachers to succeed in creating positive change.

This article examines the impact of conducting narrative research focusing on trauma and healing. It is told through three voices: the study participants who experienced the trauma, the researcher who shared her personal experiences conducting this research, and an academic colleague who acted as a reflective echo making sense of and normalizing the researcher's experience. Issues explored in the article include: harmonic resonance between the story of the participant and the life experiences of the researcher, emotional reflexivity, complex researcher roles and identities, acts of reciprocity that redress the balance of power in the research relationship, the need for compassion for the participants, and self-care for the researcher when researching trauma. The authors conclude that when researching trauma, the researcher is a member of a scholarly community and a human community, and that maintaining the stance as a member of the human community is an essential element of conducting trauma research.

Effective teachers are often creative ones, yet an examination of creative teaching is largely invisible in the North American creativity literature. Even within education there is little about teachers' own creative practice. Nonetheless, there are benefits to studying creative teachers: in education it can explicate ways of enhancing teachers' creativity and enriching praxis; and in psychology it can extend our understanding of social and interpersonal creativity, as well as everyday creativity. This paper reviews 12 Canadian case studies of creative teaching conducted by a creative teaching research group. An in-depth elaboration of two themes, creative person and community, is presented.

No abstract