204
Context
The purpose of the Professional Immersion Program (PIP) was to immerse preser-
vice teachers into the culture of a school and provide opportunities for preservice
teachers to observe teachers’ teaching and students’ learning during the first semes-
ter of a Master of Teaching program. The Professional Immersion Program (PIP)
was developed from a small-scale immersion program offered within the previous
Graduate Diploma of Education. This program provided a select number of second-
ary preservice teachers, who had shown strong academic results and demonstrated
professionalism and commitment on their first professional experience, the oppor-
tunity to be immersed into a secondary school setting under the guidance of a men-
tor. The Graduate Diploma of Teaching immersion program ran for 3 years from
2012 to 2014 and was researched using a case study framework to identify what
would be required for an up-scaled immersion program within a Master of Teaching
program.
Based on the Graduate Diploma of Teaching immersion program and a series of
meetings with local schoolteachers, school leaders and university teacher educators,
the Professional Immersion Program (PIP) was developed. The primary goal of the
PIP was to facilitate preservice teachers to make important connections between
practical school experiences and university-based studies during the first semester
of the Master of Teaching program. To achieve this, the Professional Immersion
Program included organised school experiences (e.g. undertaking professional
learning with peers and mentor teachers, conducting a lesson study with a mentor
teacher), targeted classroom observations across a range of contexts, reflective tasks
as well as professional conversations with school leaders and school mentors and
university teacher educators. All activities were aligned to a specific university sub-
ject so explicit links could be made between the subjects’ educational theory and
practical school and classroom experiences. To further support the links between
university theory and preservice experiences at school, mentor teachers and school
leaders taught in the Master of Teaching first-year subjects. Additionally, profes-
sional conversation workshops were held at the immersion school where preservice
teachers discussed and reflected on their understandings of a specified topic (e.g.
differentiation or behaviour management) with other preservice teachers, col-
leagues, school teachers/mentors and university-based teacher educators. These
conversations were carefully scaffolded by both school teacher/mentors and
university- based teacher educators to support preservice teachers’ understanding of
how theory informs practice.
Evidence of the success of immersion experiences enhancing preservice teach-
ers’ ability to connect theories learnt at university with classroom observation was
demonstrated in the small-scale Graduate Diploma of Education immersion pro-
gram and supported by previous research (Lave & Wenger, 1991 ; Conkling, 2008 ).
An unanticipated benefit of the professional conversation workshops was enhanced
understandings between school teacher/mentors and university-based teacher edu-
cators of each other’s context and the differing needs of individual preservice
S. Tindall-Ford et al.