Mentoring pre-service teachers within a school-university partnership

This chapter presents situative theories that focus on the social nature of learning. Learning is conceptualised as collaborative social practice, located in communities of practice and occurring through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in those communities. Cooperating teachers (CTs), as a gesture of amity, offer learning support to pre-service teachers in the area of classroom management and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). CTs must be selected to be physical education (PE) teacher mentors (PTMs) on the basis of suitability, not availability, in terms of both expertise and disposition. The research was situated within a four-year Bachelor of Education Physical Education degree programme in the Republic of Ireland and was funded by the Teaching Council of Ireland. In effective teacher education programmes, the strength of the school-university relationship in supporting pre-service teacher learning is pivotal. In 1896, John Dewey introduced the idea of school-university collaboration in teaching through the University of Chicago laboratory schools.