Building Personal Resources for Professional Lives: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences of Professional Learning Communities

Initial teacher education is an important contributor to teacher retention through teachers’ identity and their resilience in teaching. Relationships are key elements of teachers’ resilience and identity formation. During teacher education, professional learning communities can build these relationships and dispositions that support pre-service teachers’ persistence during challenges they encounter professionally and as students during their teacher education program. While previous research has shown the value of learning communities in professional experience in teacher education, the effects of a learning community approach to the delivery of an entire teacher education program has not previously been examined. A professional learning community approach to delivery of a postgraduate initial teacher education program was designed and has been implemented at regional campuses of an Australian university since 2018. This interpretivist study evaluated the contribution of the program to pre-service teachers’ personal resources for their professional lives as teachers. Focus groups were held with all students enrolled in the regional program in 2018 and 2021, and self-selected alumni of the program in 2022, as well as four teacher educators involved in delivering the regional program in 2021 and 2022. A thematic approach was employed to analyze the transcripts. The professional learning communities built a number of resources for teaching, including relational resilience in the form of strong relationships that offered support during the program, teacher education student engagement, and teacher identity. In the process, the learners obtained skills and dispositions that would equip them to continue to work in professional learning communities during their teaching careers. The findings highlight the importance of relationships in teacher education and have implications for the design of initial teacher education programs for teacher retention.