What are we discovering?

The preservice teachers acknowledged the importance of resilience in teaching. They were aware of:

• The intensity and complexities of teaching;
• High expectations and high accountability;
• Being role models to students (in modelling resilient behaviours);
• Needing to be flexible and adaptive “going with the flow”;
• Needing to acknowledge the need for support and be able to ask for support throughout your teaching career;
• Resilience as being important for all aspects of life.

They identified particular challenges of being preservice teachers:

• Working in another person's space;
• Having to quickly develop relationships;
• Becoming familiar with appropriate strategies, processes;
• Critical role of the supervising teacher;
• Uncertainty of who you will work with and the potential mismatch between expectations, philosophies and approaches;
• Professional experience is a high stakes assessment process – tension between what you would like to do and fitting into what is being already done.