Enhancing professional readiness demands an approach to developing curriculum
and practice in teacher education that fully embraces a full range of opportunities
for connecting knowledge development across learning environments in a coherent
and holistic manner. It follows that a key consideration for integrating
practice-based experiences in higher education curricula is to utilize their key
contributions and, if possible, redress or prepare students for the potential limiting
experiences that they might encounter (Billett 2009 ).
To do as Billet ( 2009 ) suggests requires serious consideration of three key
issues. Thefirst is the need to position expert teachers in schools and other edu-
cational settings as school-based teacher educators who, through their leadership
and mentoring, are able to significantly contribute to the learning of students of
teaching beyond‘just supervising’ classroom teaching. As research suggests,
positioning expert teachers in this way creates a positive influence on participants’
professional learning (both individually and collectively) as well as enhancing
organizational capacity.
Second, there is a need to identify the distinctiveness of that which is able to be
offered in the overall development of professional readiness among students of
teaching through intentionally integrating theory and practice prior to, during and as
a consequence of, professional experience. That means creating opportunities for
school-based educators to co-teach with academics in the academic setting and
leads to the third issue—making clear to all participants (teachers, academics and
students of teaching) the inherent value in academic and school-based educators
working together in complementary ways within and across workplace settings.
In conceptualizing learning about knowledge and practice of teaching through a
reciprocal relationship, positively responding to the three issues (above) ensures
that the learning of students of teaching can be more than the sum of each partner’s
sole contributions. More so, new possibilities for knowledge development of both
university and school based educators emerges which similarly leads to positive
gains for their practice in their workplace settings.
- Developing research excellence
Research was crucial to professional experience being positioned at the centre of
teacher education partly in response to the traditional university expectation of the
search for new knowledge. Through the repositioning of professional experience,
the ensuing collaborative endeavours created new possibilities for the production of
new knowledge of relevance to all parties involved through the exploration of
questions such as,“How do we build and contribute to the evidence base around the
contribution of Professional Experience to graduate work-readiness?”and,“How
does an (integrated approach to) Professional Experience shape the nature of
learning about knowledge and practice of teaching?”
At the same time, recognition of the need to generate data around the effec-
tiveness of practice-based learning as experienced by students of teaching was seen
as important in informing the ways in which the nature of the professional
718 A. Clemans et al.