This study aimed to elucidate the intentions of elementary school and other school administrators in their selection of student-teacher supervisors as well as the criteria used for evaluating progress of student-teacher supervisors during the student-teaching period. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight experienced school administrators, and the data was analyzed using the modified grounded theory approach (Kinoshita, 2020). Theanalysis generated 24 concepts, four categories, and five subcategories expected by school administrators as indicators of the progress of student-teacher supervisors. The relationships among the concepts and between the categories were summarized in a diagram. It became clear that school administrators help teachers serving as student-teacher supervisors develop professionally by providing indirect support. Further, following the developmental path of teacher educators, improvements in teaching aptitude are expected, enabling the student-teacher supervisors to eventually demonstrate positive educational leadership. However, more complex factors underlying administrators' intentions as school managers were also revealed. Future studies will be necessary to regard student-teacher supervision as an arena for growth as teacher educators and managers, as well as an opportunity to improve their teaching skills and aptitude so as to enhance the quality of in-service teacher training.

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This study aims to clarify the challenges faced by returning female teachers regarding teaching-career development, and how to support such development. The author, a former teacher, conducted in-depth conversations with a female teacher who had returned to a teaching position and enrolled in a graduate school program for teacher education. In-depth conversations produced co-constructed narratives. An analysis of the narratives indicated that the returning female teacher faced challenges associated with returning to work and rebuilding her career. She first chose to work as an adjunct instructor because of having left her former full-time teaching position. However, the participant felt dissatisfied and experienced a conflict between her initial decision to return in an adjunct teaching position and her desire to return to work as a full-time teacher. In addition, because there were no teachers with similar career experiences with whom she could discuss this issue in her workplace, she had no opportunity to discuss the options. Consequently, she self-regulated her sense of dissatisfaction by deciding not to think about opportunities to develop her teaching abilities. This “self-handicapping” resulted in her having low motivation to pursue career development after returning to teaching. The analysis also indicated that the participant’s experience in the graduate-level teacher education program enabled her to consider an alternative role, namely as a coordinator to facilitate her colleagues’ ongoing teacher development. This suggests that a graduate-level teacher education program can offer valuable career development opportunities by supporting the professional development of a returning teacher.

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Nowadays, middle-career teachers are expected to guide and nurture young teachers. However, how to communicate with them for effectively guiding them has not been fully clarified. Therefore, this study aimed at clarifying how senior teachers relate to and support young teachers in collaborative reflections with them. The researcher created a collaborative reflection session for one middle-career leader and four young teachers at a public junior high school and conducted participant observation of the session and post-interviews. The obtained data was analyzed qualitatively using the ALACT model as a framework. As a result, it was revealed that middle-career teachers used the helping skills theorized by Korthagen et al. (2001) as the second and third phases of the ALACT model, "Looking Back on the Action" and "Awareness of Essential Aspects", respectively. The quality of the relationship between middle-career teachers and young teachers deepened meaningfully, especially in the "facing" phase. It also revealed the difficulty of participant involvement due to the fact that middle-career leaders could potentially be the source of discomfort for young teachers in the workplace, as well as the the communication style of the middle-career leader when building on interaction between participants.

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