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trusting relationship to allow the supervising teachers to contribute and enhance the
quality of mentoring in the model. Breaking down the barriers between university
and schools allowed staff at both institutions to work together to provide the preser-
vice teachers with authentic professional experience.
There were communication challenges in implementing Model A between the
university and schools. The success of the model relied on a clear set of guidelines
for students and a guidebook for supervising teachers. Given that supervising teach-
ers are mostly focused on their daily teaching responsibilities and necessary admin-
istration duties, they often do not have time to read complex documents and
instructions. There are also schools that accept preservice teachers from several
universities, each having different placement arrangements, so clear and concise
communication is critically important in sustaining the quality learning of preser-
vice teachers. Data from interviews with supervising teachers and preservice teach-
ers indicated there were inconsistencies in implementing this model across schools
causing some misunderstanding from the supervising teachers’ perspective. One of
the teachers said:
All I would say is, I know Rachel (academic mentor) was sending out emails each week
with what elements they were focusing on and I read through those emails but I did find
that, with everything else that’s going on, what with it being the end of term 3, I don’t think
I was really on top of what element they were focusing on, so I guess if we were going to
do that properly we would all need to be involved in that in a meeting from the outset and
talk about that trajectory right from the beginning, because I just left that to Rosie and
Maggie to manage in their own self-reflection.
Similarly, there were several comments expressing the confusion in terms of the
work allocation between pairs, as one of them said:
In the future I would just make sure that there were concrete guidelines for sections in
shared lessons, so that each person knew what they were responsible for teaching and what
they were not.Model B
As the teaching school model was expanded, barriers began to emerge. Some barri-
ers were internal to the university and some came from schools. Model B was modi-
fied to accommodate local conditions of a variety of schools. There were challenges
related to timetable changes both at the university and the different schools. For
example, in 2016, the teaching school model of embedded paired placement for a
semester or a year was only adopted in six partner schools. A larger number of part-
ners (30) accepted paired placements of students in 3- or 4-week blocks; however,
the majority of placement schools continued with the traditional 1:1 model. It was
clear that there is a greater acceptance of paired placements in primary schools than
secondary schools. Secondary schools were more reluctant to take preservice teach-
ers in paired placements. In some cases, this is related to the difficulty of pairing
students according to discipline areas.
C. Lang and H.T.M. Nguyen