Many pre-service teachers (PSTs) face a common dilemma when completing their internships: they seek to display their own strengths and competencies in teaching while also adhering to the guidance of their mentor teachers and avoiding instructional risks. The underlying structure of the internship promotes a hierarchy which positions mentoring teachers as experts who evaluate their mentees and pre-service teachers who depend on their mentoring teachers’ approval to become licensed teachers. Research into innovative internship structures, such as rounds, can offer insights on how this hierarchy can be flattened in ways that benefit both the pre-service teachers and their mentoring teachers.

In this study, I use qualitative case study methods to explore two PSTs and their mentoring teachers’ participation together in a novel form of professional development centered on peer observations called rounds. I further explored how their participation in rounds enhanced the PSTs’ instructional practice in their internships. I facilitated four instances of rounds with the group, observed and interviewed the PSTs four times during their internship, and interviewed each participant once the internship was complete. I analyzed these data through the lens of communities of practice to examine how the PSTs and mentoring teachers worked together around the joint enterprise of inquiring into their teaching of multilingual learners. I also drew on the constructs of boundary crossing and boundary objects to conceptualize how teachers carried aspects of our rounds into other communities of practice at the school and into the PSTs’ instruction.

Findings revealed that several aspects of the rounds contributed to a flattening of the hierarchy of status between the PSTs and the mentoring teachers during the rounds. However, changes in the hierarchy during the rest of the internship were more tenuous due to rounds’ difficulty in addressing certain intractable criteria for status as a full teacher in school settings. Observing the PSTs’ internships before, during, and after rounds illustrated how rounds could function as sites of exposure to and experimentation related to persistent instructional problems. The PSTs generated knowledge during rounds that they incorporated back into their internships with unanticipated results that reinforced the iterative and ongoing nature of teacher learning. To break down the barriers of isolation within internships and to challenge the status quo of mentor-PST power dynamics, teacher preparation programs must explore internship structures that move away from evaluation and into collaborative inquiry across experience levels.