Translation to Practice: Insights from the Stakeholders’ Experiences in a Collaborative Model of Professional Experience

There have been continuous calls for reforms in initial teacher education as it plays a critical role in preparing future qualified teachers. One of the burning issues challenging initial teacher education is to enhance the quality of professional experience to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, there is a dearth of research which explores how the professional experience model can support and/or hinder the learning experiences of the stakeholders such as tertiary mentors, school mentors and pre-service teachers (PSTs) in the process of theory-practice integration. The current chapter reports a research study which examines the experiences of all the stakeholders in a community of practice model of professional experience, the learning opportunities offered to them, and their changing perceptions of roles. The main sources of data were collected from the interviews with PSTs and their university and school mentors. Implications from the study highlight the role of this collaborative practicum model in providing meaningful learning opportunities for pre-service teachers, supervising teachers as well as university supervisors and redefining their roles in the professional experience in a context in Australia.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-32-9910-8_5