The Value of Prior Professional Skills and Experiences: Perceptions of Second-Career Teachers

Second-career teachers’ pathways to teaching are often different from the traditional pathways of first-career teachers. This hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the common traits that second-career teachers share that may be unique within education, and whether second-career teachers’ prior skills and experiences assisted them in their new profession. The study also examined whether second-career teachers perceived that their certification programs helped them to develop their teacher identities and taught them to utilize their prior work experiences. Finally, this study investigated whether second career teachers believed that administrators valued their distinctive abilities. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews illustrating the individual experiences of 12 second-career teachers. Data were analyzed to develop emergent themes that provided answers to the four research questions guiding this study. The conclusions presented new insight into the high value second-career teachers place on their prior professional skills and experiences. Evidence also suggested that second-career teachers do not believe certification programs and district administrators place the same value on those skills and experiences. In order to reduce attrition of second-career teachers it is recommended that administrators recognize, develop, and utilize their prior professional skills and experiences as a resource for students and colleagues

The Value of Prior Professional Skills and Experiences: Perceptions of Second-Career Teachers

Second-career teachers’ pathways to teaching are often different from the traditional pathways of first-career teachers. This hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the common traits that second-career teachers share that may be unique within education, and whether second-career teachers’ prior skills and experiences assisted them in their new profession. The study also examined whether second-career teachers perceived that their certification programs helped them to develop their teacher identities and taught them to utilize their prior work experiences. Finally, this study investigated whether second career teachers believed that administrators valued their distinctive abilities. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews illustrating the individual experiences of 12 second-career teachers. Data were analyzed to develop emergent themes that provided answers to the four research questions guiding this study. The conclusions presented new insight into the high value second-career teachers place on their prior professional skills and experiences. Evidence also suggested that second-career teachers do not believe certification programs and district administrators place the same value on those skills and experiences. In order to reduce attrition of second-career teachers it is recommended that administrators recognize, develop, and utilize their prior professional skills and experiences as a resource for students and colleagues

Automatic Amortized Resource Analysis with Regular Recursive Types

The goal of automatic resource bound analysis is to statically infer symbolic bounds on the resource consumption of the evaluation of a program. A longstanding challenge for automatic resource analysis is the inference of bounds that are functions of complex custom data structures. This article builds on type-based automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) to address this challenge. AARA is based on the potential method of amortized analysis and reduces bound inference to standard type inference with additional linear constraint solving, even when deriving non-linear bounds. A key component of AARA is resource functions that generate the space of possible bounds for values of a given type while enjoying necessary closure properties. Existing work on AARA defined such functions for many data structures such as lists of lists but the question of whether such functions exist for arbitrary data structures remained open. This work answers this questions positively by uniformly constructing resource polynomials for algebraic data structures defined by regular recursive types. These functions are a generalization of all previously proposed polynomial resource functions and can be seen as a general notion of polynomials for values of a given recursive type. A resource type system for FPC, a core language with recursive types, demonstrates how resource polynomials can be integrated with AARA while preserving all benefits of past techniques. The article also proposes the use of new techniques useful for stating the rules of this type system and proving it sound. First, multivariate potential annotations are stated in terms of free semimodules, substantially abstracting details of the presentation of annotations and the proofs of their properties. Second, a logical relation giving semantic meaning to resource types enables a proof of soundness by a single induction on typing derivations.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; to be published in LICS'2