79Another preservice teacher explained how they valued the questioning strategies
that they had learned on-campus:
And a lot of prompting and questioning and getting them to think more than us just telling
them has been really helpful, like in guided reading asking ‘What’s this story about?’, that
kind of thing.
These very basic but fundamental teaching methods outlined in the above quotes
mediated these preservice teachers’ induction into their first professional experi-
ence providing them with strategies they could employ from day one.
It might be expected that preservice teachers on their first professional experi-
ence would be concerned about managing their class. One preservice teacher could
identify the techniques learned on-campus as contributing to learning:
I guess behaviour management techniques, we learnt them and now putting them into action
I realise what’s actually really beneficial for learning in class.
This direct link of classroom management to student learning demonstrates that
the teaching methods learned at university mediated this preservice teacher’s induc-
tion into their first professional experience.
The preservice teachers in this study recognised the quality of the lesson models
that they had been exposed to in their on-campus learning. One preservice teacher
in their postexperience interview recalled these lessons as the most memorable for
the following reasons:
... and then I did some lessons that I’d learnt at uni and really liked, and those were the
lessons I’ve remembered most. I guess because I saw them as higher order thinking lessons
and interesting lessons and given the fact that I was given the opportunity to teach those
interesting lessons I also learnt from the experience.
The preservice teacher describes their own learning occurring because they were
teaching interesting lessons that involved higher-order thinking. This is further evi-
dence that the teaching methods learned on-campus mediated these preservice
teachers’ entry into the profession during their first professional experience.
It is noteworthy that these preservice teachers on their first professional experi-
ence were able to see beyond their own learning to those of the students they were
teaching. One preservice teacher in their postexperience interview described the
challenge of teaching a diverse range of learners:
... because we’ve done a lot about different learners, which is something that I kind of
thought about. But I didn’t realise how big an effect it is when you have a child that’s all the
way down the bottom and then you have a really high achieving child in your class, I think
the spectrum has been really overwhelming.
It is impossible to claim from this excerpt that an awareness of diverse learners
mediated a successful teaching response on the part of this particular preservice
teacher. However, this awareness is something that sometimes eludes much more
experienced teachers and is quite an achievement for a preservice teacher on their
first professional experience, who is generally more concerned with their own learn-
ing than the learning of the students they are teaching.
5 Boundary Objects and Brokers in Professional Experience