Teachers are faced with an increasingly complex environment in which they need significant support to foster the classroom climates their students benefit from. Developing a critical understanding of the school and broader social context can foster awareness of the 'bigger picture' that influences the school community individually and…

Mentoring plays a critical role in providing a quality professional experience for pre-service teachers in their initial teacher education. There have been numerous studies about pre-service teacher mentoring, yet actual mentoring practice still remains varied and poorly understood. Consequently, there is a need for mentoring processes that can…

While embedded in teacher professional standards and assumed aspects of teacher professionalism, willingness and ability to engage in professional dialogue about practice and curriculum initiatives are rarely examined or explicitly taught in teacher education programs. With this in mind, the authors designed an assessment task for pre-service…

The study described in this paper Creating an effective practicum model for rural and regional preservice teachers is designed to address the ongoing difficulties experienced by schools and universities as they seek to provide high quality preservice teacher education for individuals in rural areas. Lecturers from the regional campuses of two…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…

One of the perennial challenges for academics working in the area of professional experiences (practicum) is how to negotiate the constantly moving and contradictory boundaries around their work. A number of questions arise. Firstly, how do they cope with the "shifting, changing landscape" (Clandinin, 2008) of the university and at the…

In the Australian state of Victoria, control of academic curriculum has shifted from the bureaucrats to locally based teacher networks and statewide associations which limit subject scope and teaching styles. However, curriculum has not changed significantly, indicating that institutional reforms do not necessarily result in radical alterations of…

Most Australian teachers do not hold traditional methods of supervision in very high regard. A more acceptable form of supervision, clinical supervision, utilizes the information gathered from classroom observations to allow the teacher to gain a wider perspective on his or her own performance under non-threatening conditions. A limited survey,…

This study explored, through phenomenological interviewing, the impact of a semester-long collaborative professional development course on the perceptions and practices of four teachers in relation to their supervisory roles. Results indicated that the teachers valued work that was self-directed, considered their expressed needs, and let them…