Building a whole school approach to professional experience: Collaboration and community

This paper explores one implementation of an extended, structured, collaborative professional experience program. Its context is a new partnership between a university and a professional experience school. The program draws on elements of Instructional Rounds and Lesson Study, framed around a learning community model of professional experience for peer collaboration, observations, reflections and discussions across disciplines by pre-service teachers. Results show that pre-service teachers experienced a sense of belonging, developed professional relationships and dialogue with staff and peers, linked theory with practice, and developed dispositions for on-going improvement of teaching quality, all factors likely to improve their readiness for teaching. On the other hand, participants faced challenges in terms of logistics and communication, time pressure and anxiety and power relations between novice and expert.