Theory to Practice in Teacher Education by Christine Grima-Farrell & Tony Loughland & Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen

Author:Christine Grima-Farrell & Tony Loughland & Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789813299108
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Introduction

Australian education reforms over the past decade have been strongly influenced by a focus on the quality of teachers and teacher education programs (e.g., Brandenburg et al. 2016; Gale and Parker 2017; Mills and Goos 2017; Weldon 2015) The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL 2018) and the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE 2017) have called for the delivery of system-wide reforms to improve the quality of teachers and teacher education programs. These reforms clearly have implications for professional experience as this component plays a significant role in student teacher learning and retaining talented teachers in the profession.

Pre-service teacher learning in Australia is also under pressure to change as a result of a shift from a state to national system of teacher standards and accreditation (AITSL 2016). It has impacted on supervising teachers’ work in teacher education program and invokes a higher level of accountability and professional pressure on pre-service teachers as well as university mentors (Bloomfield 2009; White et al. 2010). Thus, there is a continuing need for innovations to enhance the quality of the professional experience component of initial teacher education (ACDE 2017; Mayer 2014; Gale and Parker 2017; TEMAG 2014; White et al. 2010) in order to meet policy goals and to create practices that are underpinned by research.

There has been an increasing trend towards restructuring professional experiences around strong school-university partnerships (Ambrosetti et al. 2018; NSW Government 2016; Standal et al. 2014; AITSL 2016). However, most of these initiatives have not addressed the issue of how professional experience could be reframed in more democratic and practical ways to enhance the learning of all the stakeholders involved. While there is growing research that explores the particular experiences of pre-service teachers and mentor teachers in professional experiences (Sim 2011; White and Forgasz 2016; Grimmett et al. 2018), there is less empirical evidence on the experiences of university-based mentors as they participate in a learning community, particularly how their roles are shaped in these experiences. Understanding how the roles of each stakeholder, particularly in relation to those of others within school-university partnerships, is essential if the aim is to establish a high-quality school placement for all participants in this process. Role perception is therefore considered as an important part in the professional learning of these stakeholders (Grimmett et al. 2018).

This chapter reports on how the implementation of an initiative in the first professional experience in a graduate teacher education program in New South Wales, Australia impacts on the participants’ learning opportunities and their role perceptions. Studying the learning outcomes of such an initiative is important as the insights gained into what the participants learn, why they learn it, and under what conditions will significantly improve the professional experiences that follow and the quality of the teacher preparation program more generally. This chapter responds to the call for providing more empirical evidence of innovations in school and university partnership to bring together many stakeholders in teacher education. The professional experience creates a community of practice which

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