The trend for mature age professionals to transition to teaching as second career teachers continues to increase internationally. Second career teachers offer the promise of bringing ‘real world’ experience and substantive discipline knowledge to teaching along with a range of personal qualities and attributes drawn from prior careers and life experiences. Many of these prospective teachers already hold degrees outside of education and so transition to teaching via short graduate entry teacher education programs rather than the traditional four-year undergraduate programs. This study examined the views of prospective second career teachers as they transitioned into a one-year graduate entry teacher education program in a large urban university in eastern Australia. The specific focus was on the backgrounds, perceived strengths and the challenges that the teacher education students believed awaited them in the classroom. The participant’s perceptions of the qualities that constitute a good teacher also provided a focus for the research. Data were drawn from surveying 53 prospective second career teachers in their first days of the graduate entry program. The findings reveal a wide diversity of previous careers and a range of characteristics that includes enthusiasm, patience, open-mindedness and a strong work ethic. However, there are omissions and silences in the data that appear to indicate a lack of consideration of discipline knowledge and academic engagement as key qualities of a good teacher. The layers of the ‘onion’ model derived from the work of Dilts (1990) and Korthagen (2004) will be used to help understand the level of change in personal development and ways in which their backgrounds and experiences may influence their emerging professional identities as they transition to teaching. The research has implications for the ways in which teacher educators engage with this unique group and capitalise on their potential.

Dilts, R. (1990). Changing belief systems. Capitola, CA: Meta-publications. Korthagen, F. (2004). In search of the essence of a good teacher: Towards a more holistic approaching teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(1), 77-97.