Nurturing an Intern Learning Community in a Professional Development School Culture: Spaces for Voice and Multiple Perspectives.

Embedded in the framework of a Professional Development School (PDS) culture, this paper explores how interns in a learning community experienced collegial interactions, conversations, and collaborative reflection. The PDS intern community was a transformative learning forum in which empowered novice teachers articulated and examined their beliefs and analyzed their classroom practice. Within the confines of a safe and nonthreatening peer environment, interns created personal meanings of their experiences, posed further wonderings about children's thinking and ideas, and reflected on how to make "better problems." Fostering "best" teaching practices, contemplating theory-practice issues, understanding the political and social culture of the schooling context, and building natural interdependencies provided stimuli for these preservice teachers to raise their voices and consider multiple perspectives. Within the learning community, interns created spaces as they individually and collectively began making sense of learning to teach and teaching to learn in a PDS culture. (Contains 47 references.) (Author/SM)