Teachers' proactive behaviour: Interactions with job characteristics and professional competence in a longitudinal study.

Background: In times of accelerating changes, teachers who proactively engage in activities towards school improvement and innovation are increasingly needed. Still, studies on factors that affect teachers' proactive behaviour are rare.

Aims: Integrating previous research on proactive behaviour within the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) Model, this paper investigates how job characteristics (time pressure, bureaucratic structures, participative climate, personal initiative of the team) and aspects of teachers' professional competence (self-efficacy, self-regulation skills and knowledge) contribute to and interact with their proactive behaviour.

What makes a good teacher? The relative importance of mathematics teachers' cognitive ability, personality, knowledge, beliefs, and motivation for instructional quality.

Background: Teachers differ substantially in their instructional performance in the classroom. Thus, researchers and policymakers are interested in how these differences can be explained and how the instruction provided by low-performing teachers can be improved. Previous research has focused either on generic (cognitive ability and personality) or profession-specific (professional knowledge, beliefs, and motivation for teaching) teacher characteristics as predictors of instructional quality but their relative importance has not yet been tested.

A longitudinal study of teachers' occupational well-being: Applying the job demands-resources model.

The job demands-resources model (JD-R model; Bakker & Demerouti, 2014) is well established in occupational research, and the proposed processes it posits have been replicated numerous times. Thus, the JD-R model provides an excellent framework for explaining the occupational well-being of beginning teachers-an occupation associated with particularly high levels of strain and consequently, high attrition rates. However, the model's assumptions have to date mostly been tested piecewise, and seldom on the basis of longitudinal models.