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The article focuses on ways in which foreign language teachers in Georgia evaluate their professional preparation. One distinct point of consensus has clearly emerged from foreign language (FL) professionals' discussions of teacher development over the last few years: Teacher preparation programs must be the result of collaborative approaches designed to maximize the effects of any and all strategies for improvement. The belief that teacher preparation can be improved through collaborative efforts is also one of the guiding principles of the Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Program (GSTEP), a grant initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Georgia Department of Education involving three institutions of higher learning in Georgia: Albany State University, the University of Georgia, and Valdosta State University. The purpose of the grant is to enhance and improve all phases of teacher preparation by summoning the collaboration of all entities and departments involved. This article focuses on a collaborative project of the FL GSTEP committee that conducted an online survey of current foreign language teachers in Georgia in order to determine how these K-12 teachers perceived and evaluated the effectiveness of their professional preparation.

In a series of four studies, the self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model is used to predict peoples' self-reported affective responses to doing better or worse than their partners. Both self-protective reactions to comparison (i.e., those predicted by the original SEM model) and empathic reactions to the partner's response (i.e., those predicted by the extended SEM model) were obtained. In addition, as predicted on the basis of both models, comparisons with romantic partners resulted in a different pattern of self-reported affect than did comparisons with strangers. Unexpectedly, it appeared that empathic effects were minimal or absent among dating partners when comparisons were in areas of high self-relevance.