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Emphasising the professional development of early career teachers, with an emphasis on pedagogy, is an obvious priority in improving student outcomes. Surprisingly then, in all the rhetoric around mentoring early career teachers (ECTs) this emphasis appears to be missing. This study explores the implications of professional development for ECTs in a particular pedagogical skill, in this case cooperative learning (CL), and the impact of this on the quality of teaching of two early career teachers. An abundance of research literature, over a significant number of years, argues that by focussing on cooperative learning as a pedagogical strategy, students' social and academic outcomes will improve. This paper advocates ECTs expert use of CL to ensure this increase in both social and academic outcomes. The importance of this focus on pedagogy for ECTs as they use CL more in their classrooms is explored by analysing pre and post classroom observations, both in CL and in Quality teaching, as well as semi-structured teacher interviews. These are analysed to investigate teachers' implementation of the cooperative learning strategy, to evaluate their understanding of classroom practice in CL and its impact on the quality of their teaching. The teacher with more years of experience made gains in both cooperative learning and quality teaching demonstrating an emphasis on pedagogy was significant in enhancing her professional accomplishment. The teacher with less experience struggled with other aspects of beginning teaching, such as school context and burnout, which had an effect on the overall quality of her teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do active learning strategies assist students in learning complex concepts? The current paper explores this inquiry utilizing data concerning three role-playing simulations in an introductory comparative politics course to reinforce such concepts as cohabitation, coalition government, and federalism. The hypothesis that students gain greater knowledge of such abstract concepts is subsequently tested utilizing pre- and post-simulation surveys, debriefing responses, and inclass exams. The results indicate that simulations play an important role in enhancing student subjective knowledge, but not necessarily their objective knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]