A shifting policy landscape in Australian teacher education has led to the introduction of teaching performance assessment tasks in initial teacher education degrees, foregrounding data literacy practices. The aim of this research was to explore pre-service teachers' uses of data to inform and evaluate their teaching practice as demonstrated in…

Professional experience is viewed by governments, schools, universities and pre-service teachers as a crucial, and for some, the most important element of initial teacher education. Pre-service teachers (PSTs) consistently cite time in schools as the most valuable part of their teacher education programme. High-quality professional experience…

There is both a growing appreciation of teacher assessment capability for the improvement of school student learning and achievement and a commensurate drive for graduates in Australian Initial Teacher Education institutions to demonstrate impact on school student learning as part of a national accreditation process. We argue in this article that…

This paper reports on how Maria (pseudonym), a non-native English speaker (NNES) and preservice teacher (PST) of English as an additional language (EAL), developed her professional identity during the practicum in an Australian secondary school. Drawing on activity theory, the study identified contradictions in Maria's practicum activity and…

This paper offers an overview of what motivates and challenges Australian supervising teachers to work with preservice teachers in their classrooms. In the contemporary Australian context of new National Professional Standards for Teachers, a new national curriculum and new standards for Initial Teacher Education programs, what motivates and…

Many teacher education institutions across the world are now initiating and supporting international teaching practicums to better prepare their teaching graduates to teach for diversity. Recently, some of these practicums have embedded service-learning structures and discourses to further encourage pre-service teachers (PSTs) to think beyond…

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman,…

This study explores the development, description, and illustration of inherent requirement (IR) statements to make explicit the requirements for performance on an initial teacher education (ITE) practicum. Through consultative group processes with stakeholders involved in ITE, seven IR domains were identified. From interviews with academics,…

The title of the 2014 Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) conference was "Teacher Education, An Audit: Building a platform for future engagement." One of the conference themes was "Professional Experience: What works? Why?" I seized upon this theme and the title of the conference as it afforded me an opportunity to…

It is argued that online discussion is a useful tool for creating opportunities for learning in teacher education. In a project designed to improve the practicum in rural areas, researchers placed pre-service teachers (PSTs) in two different moderated online discussion forums: an unstructured personal blog space and a structured threaded…

As populations in contemporary Western societies grow increasingly diverse, preparing predominantly White middle-class pre-service teachers to better understand and work with difference productively has become increasingly critical. Historically, however, teacher education programs have aimed to address diversity with add-on or piecemeal…

International practicum is disappearing from teacher education programs with the increasing pressures for "local experience". International practicum is seen as too different from local contexts to develop preservice teachers to meet professional standards. This study explores the teaching development of a group of 24 preservice teachers…

This article reports the investigation of change in preservice teachers' conceptions of effective history teaching across a secondary history methods course in a postgraduate diploma of education program. Using concept mapping to plot shifts in their expressed reflections, data were obtained that indicate personal constructs of effective history…

Across the world, the work of teacher educators in universities is subject to contradictory discourses of, on the one hand, globalisation and standardisation and, on the other, innovation in both teaching and research. This article is a critical account of a particular experience of an Australian teacher educator leading an international teaching…

This paper reports a study of three beginning secondary mathematics teachers and how their reflective practice developed during a one-year university teacher education program and concurrent professional fieldwork experience or practicum. The participants were interviewed three times during the practicum and once more in their first year of…