Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience

Retaining teachers in the early stages of the profession is a major issue of concern in many countries. Teacher resilience is a relatively recent area of investigation which provides a way of understanding what enables teachers to persist in the face of challenges and offers a complementary perspective to studies of stress, burnout and attrition. We have known for many years that teaching can be stressful, particularly for new teachers, but little appears to have changed. This paper reviews recent empirical studies related to the resilience of early career teachers. Resilience is shown to be the outcome of a dynamic relationship between individual risk and protective factors. Individual attributes such as altruistic motives and high self-efficacy are key individual protective factors. Contextual challenges or risk factors and contextual supports or protective factors can come from sources such as school administration, colleagues, and pupils. Challenges for the future are to refine conceptualisations of teacher resilience and to develop and examine interventions in multiple contexts. There are many opportunities for those who prepare, employ and work with prospective and new teachers to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors and so enable new teachers to thrive, not just survive

Gravity and Yang-Mills theory

Three of the four forces of Nature are described by quantum Yang-Mills theories with remarkable precision. The fourth force, gravity, is described classically by the Einstein-Hilbert theory. There appears to be an inherent incompatibility between quantum mechanics and the Einstein-Hilbert theory which prevents us from developing a consistent quantum theory of gravity. The Einstein-Hilbert theory is therefore believed to differ greatly from Yang-Mills theory (which does have a sensible quantum mechanical description). It is therefore very surprising that these two theories actually share close perturbative ties. This article focuses on these ties between Yang-Mills theory and the Einstein-Hilbert theory. We discuss the origin of these ties and their implications for a quantum theory of gravity.Comment: 6 pages, based on contribution to GRF 2010, to appear in a special edition of IJMP

The vacuum state functional of interacting string field theory

We show that the vacuum state functional for both open and closed string field theories can be constructed from the vacuum expectation values it must generate. The method also applies to quantum field theory and as an application we give a diagrammatic description of the equivalance between Schrodinger and covariant repreresentations of field theory.Comment: 15 pages, 35 .eps figure

Boundary fermion currents and subleading order chiral anomaly in the AdS/CFT correspondence

We construct a wave-functional whose argument couples to boundary fermion currents in the AdS/CFT correspondence. Using this we calculate the contributions from bulk fermions to the chiral anomaly that give the subleading order term in the exact $N$-dependence of the chiral anomaly of ${\cal N}=4$ SYM. The result agrees with the calculation of Bilal & Chu.Comment: 6 page