Holistic, aspirational professional standards as a boundary object between communities of practice for pre-service teachers

This article reports on a research project which seeks to understand how pre-service teachers and their school-based ‘mentors’ use a holistic, developmental set of professional standards as a tool for professional development and assessment. The standards are designed to be used to ‘improve not prove’, but there has not been research into the efficacy of this approach for the newest members of the teaching profession. Using Lave and Wenger’s concept of communities of practice, Maton’s concept of semantic waves from his Legitimation Code Theory and Korthagen & Lagerwerf’s Gestalt model of theory formation, the authors propose that the school-based mentors’ strategies to ‘unpack’ the standards for use in the specific school context are vital for pre-service teachers’ development, but that the absence of an explicit imperative to ‘repack’ the standards at points of transition reduces their efficacy as a boundary object, creating moments of discontinuity in the pre-service teacher’s journey.