Early Career Teachers’ Perceptions of Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

This chapter discusses how beginning teachers perceive their preparedness for work, drawing on findings from the Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE) project (Mayer et al. 2017). The goal of this large-scale, longitudinal project was to explore graduate teachers' experiences in Australia in order to understand their perceptions of teacher preparation and teaching in the early years of their career. In doing so, the study sought to understand: first, how effective graduates and principals perceived teacher education programs to be in preparing the graduates for the diverse settings in which they take up teaching employment; second, whether there were any aspects of the teacher education programs that seemed to be linked to their preparedness for teaching and their effectiveness as beginning teachers; and third, the career and employment pathways of the new teachers as well as retention and attrition. In this chapter, the focus is on the teachers' experience of perception as they transition across professional spaces between universities and schools. The transitional synthesis of perceptions has wide-ranging implications for understanding the utility of teacher education in and through situated experiences of beginning teachers in schools. [For the complete volume, "Innovation and Accountability in Teacher Education: Setting Directions for New Cultures in Teacher Education. Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability," see ED595068.]