Notre Dame Advances in Education – serie

Stories of Beginning Teachers offers insight into the challenges and triumphs of beginning teachers, presenting both research findings and case studies on the challenges faced by new teachers. More than twenty categories and five hundred specific examples of potential problems and issues are cited in Part 1 of this book. Armed with such useful information about the most frequent, serious, and persistent challenges, Roehrig, Pressley, and Talotta assert, a young educator will be better prepared to teach and more likely to succeed.Part 2 contains stories of the teaching experience of participants in the University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education. Included are nine vivid stories of the struggles and successes of new teachers reflecting on their first year, as well as sixteen shorter summaries of the daily lives of beginning teachers. Reading this book, a novice teacher will better understand student motivation, student learning, human development, classroom organization, classroom management, assessment techniques, and the administration of schools.

The Alliance for Catholic Education, referred to most commonly by its acronym ACE, is one of the best known and widely respected programs at the University of Notre Dame. The rock band U2 praised it during a concert at Notre Dame, the President of the United States acknowledged it in a valedictory address, and each year hundreds of students compete for admission. Established in 1994 by Fr. Timothy Scully, C.S.C., and Fr. Sean McGraw, C.S.C., ACE places more than 150 college graduates in over one hundred parochial schools throughout the United States. The overarching purpose of ACE is to improve Catholic schools, especially in underprivileged areas of the U.S., by enabling exceptionally talented students to teach in them. ACE, in turn, offers students two years of meaningful service and a graduate degree from Notre Dame.In Teaching Service and Alternative Teacher Education: Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education, Michael Pressley and his fellow contributors provide the history of ACE. They also offer a blueprint for other educational institutions interested in implementing a similar program. Covering the fundamentals of starting and maintaining a program like ACE, Teaching Service and Alternative Teacher Education discusses motivation, planning, intellectual foundations, and community building. It also tackles practical issues such as financing the program, obtaining accreditation, and recruiting teachers.

Variations in students' performance across different school sectors—specifically, public, private religious, and private nonreligious schools—has long been an important topic in the sociology of education. In recent years, debate over the merits of each sector has increased between advocates and critics of school choice, as exemplified by current struggles over educational vouchers and their ramifications for public policy and politics.What has been lacking in this debate, however, has been a theoretically grounded empirical analysis of the factors that affect student success across sectors. School Sector and Student Outcomes offers such an assessment. By presenting a set of methodologically rigorous empirical studies, the volume provides a viable basis for comparisons across sectors on such issues as school organization, governance, curriculum, and pedagogy in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. Carefully reasoned conceptual analyses identify the source of sector differences, trace the evolution of the dual school system in the U.S., and describe the mechanisms that link school sector to school processes. The volume amply documents how sector differences operate and what the consequences are for student learning and behavior.Of intrinsic interest to administrators and scholars in education and the sociology of education, this volume should stimulate new research and help educators improve both public and private schools.