Building and Sustaining a Teaching Career Strategies for Professional Experience, Wellbeing and Mindful Practice

Professional experience in initial teacher education programs can be both a challenging and rewarding experience. As student teachers take their first steps in the classroom, they often encounter stresses that compromise their teaching and learning. Within this context, well-being, resilience and self-efficacy are critical to their success. Building and sustaining a teaching career introduces the coping strategies, informal and formal practices, time management and organisational skills, and positive psychology critical to self-care for professional experience. The text uses case studies, 'fill your bucket' strategy building solutions, reflection activities and discussion and journaling questions designed to build capacity and develop reader knowledge, while pre-service teacher voices highlight key elements through real-world perspectives and experiences. Drawing upon a combination of teaching experience and education research, Narelle Lemon and Sharon McDonough present thoughtful, practical approaches that equip pre-service teachers with the necessary skills and knowledge for embarking on a successful teaching career.

Introduction. Building mindful resources as a pre-service teacher. Section 1. Mindfulness and its place in being a teacher: 1. What is mindfulness?; 2. Becoming and being a mindful teacher. Section 2. Developing mindful practices as a teacher: 3. Developing the confidence to teach: Communicating and working with others; 4. Developing your skills as a teacher: Learning in school and in university contexts; 5. Developing as a teacher: Learning from professional experience; 6. Learning to teach: identifying and addressing stressors; 7. Organising and caring for yourself as a teacher; Conclusion. Putting your best foot forward.

Narelle Lemon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Swinburne University with research areas focused on participation and engagement. She explores this through a variety of avenues including creativity and arts education, positive psychology specifically aimed at mindfulness practice and coping strategies, and social media use for learning and professional development. Narelle blogs at www.exploreandcreateco.com on mindfulness and self-care, Tweets as @Rellypops and curates an online project to promote stories of how mindfulness are applied to people's lives from various disciplines in the community on Instagram through @exploreandcreateco.
Sharon McDonough is a Senior Lecturer and researcher in initial teacher education and teacher development in the School of Education at Federation University Australia. Sharon draws on socio-cultural theories of teacher emotion and resilience that she brings to aims of i) how to best prepare and support teachers for entry into the profession; and ii) how to support teacher, and teacher educator, professional learning across the lifespan of their careers.