Scenario 3: Alexander

Alexander’s final professional experience was in a large school with a highly diverse population.  While he was somewhat apprehensive about teaching such a diverse cohort, he also viewed the experience as a “great opportunity to learn”.  After the half-way point of his professional experience, Alexander commented that trying to differentiate to meet the needs of the students in his class “was very time consuming” and he was struggling with allocating appropriate time to lessons.  In particular he was frustrated with “preparing a lesson you thought would last an hour but finished in ten minutes”.  In addition to the eight hours at school each day, Alexander was spending “nearly four hours at home to prepare the activities for the next day”.   He had a “super supportive host teacher” who was highly effective in the classroom and had many years of teaching experience.  During professional experience, Alexander felt the key source of his stress was the “pressure of always being watched” and admitted that he might be too critical of his own teaching.   As he was nearing the end of his teacher education program, Alexander’s financial resources were very limited after his years of study.  Alexander felt that he had to excel on this final professional experience to secure a job as a teacher. However, his financial situation was exacerbated as his commitments at school meant that he had to reduce his part-time work considerably while he was on professional experience.