initial teacher education

Beginner teachers are NOT under prepared and NOT bad at managing behaviour. Here’s the evidence

September 10, 2020initial teacher education, quality teachingbeginner teachers, beginning teachers, Classroom ready teachers, early career teachers, initial teacher education, ITE, Kathy Cologon, Linda Graham, newly graduated teachers, quality teaching, Robert Pianta, Sonia White, teacher education, teaching quality

For years claims have been circulating that newly graduated teachers are under prepared to teach in today’s often challenging classrooms, and that they are bad at classroom management. Thanks to mainstream media interest, and critics within education circles, these claims have led to an increasing array of government interventions in Initial Teacher Education in universities around Australia. What, how and to whom teacher education is delivered has been thoroughly examined and churned in the bid to improve teaching quality and student outcomes.

As teacher educators, intimately involved in teaching our new teachers and supporting them as they embark on their careers, we were deeply concerned about these claims so went looking for evidence of what was going wrong.

This blog post is about our research and what we found.

Be surprised, we found no evidence that beginning teachers in Australia are unprepared for the classroom or that they are bad at behaviour management.

We believe extensive reforms have been made to Initial Teacher Education in Australia to ‘improve’ teacher quality without any evidence to support the claim that beginning teachers are less competent than experienced teachers.

Our research, carried out in Australian schools, found that most beginning teachers in fact engaged in higher levels of emotional support than their more experienced colleagues, and for most, behaviour management is not a problem.

Background on government ‘reforms’ to make teachers “classroom ready”

Following the now infamous 2014 Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group report, which formalised the (we believe false) claim that graduate teachers were unprepared for the classroom, Australian universities have responded to accreditation requirements by

mapping course content to the Australian Professional Standards for Teaching
introducing the Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) and
implementing the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Teacher Education Students (LANTITE).

Various state governments have also made changes that impact universities intake criteria and course content: Queensland, for example, has mandated that students entering primary teacher education degrees must have four semesters of sound achievement in English, Maths and Science. New South Wales has signalled that to be eligible for employment in NSW government schools, students commencing a teaching degree from 2019, must:

Receive a minimum credit grade point average in their university degree.
Prove sound practical knowledge and ability, which will be reflected by an assessment of every single practicum report.
Show superior cognitive and emotional intelligence measured via a psychometric assessment.
Demonstrate their commitment to the values of public education in a behavioural interview.

Those doing online degrees are out.

None of these measures are bad, in and of themselves, although they have created significant compliance burden for teacher educators and schools of education, as well as increasing the fiscal pressure on schools and faculties of education.

The problem is that these interventions into university teacher education have come without any supporting empirical evidence that beginning teachers are less competent than their more experienced colleagues.

Our research into the teaching quality and classroom management skills of newly graduated teachers

What research method did we use?

There are different ways of measuring the quality of teaching. The two main ways involve using test scores (like NAPLAN for example) or by observing teachers teaching, and measuring the presence or absence of teaching practices known to add positively to students’ social, behavioural, and academic outcomes. The latter method is, of course, much more expensive because it uses direct observation, but it also can’t be manipulated like test scores can.

One method of direct observation is the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) observation measure developed by University of Virginia education specialists Bridget Hamre and Robert Pianta. We used this method in our six-year longitudinal study.

In our paper published in Teaching and Teacher Education this week, we compare the CLASS scores of beginning teachers (0-3 years’ experience) and experienced teachers (more than 3 years’ experience) and found no significant differences between the groups.

We used the CLASS system in our study investigating the development of severely disruptive behaviour of students because we were interested in learning the contribution made by the quality of teaching. In the very first year of this six-year longitudinal study, we noticed three standout teachers who were all in their early 20s and wrote about it in the AARE EduResearch Matters blog.

That’s also when we decided to ask how many years our teacher participants had been teaching in our research interviews because we were interested to see whether the excellent practice we were seeing bore out over time with a much larger number of participants.

Six years later, we can finally reveal: yes, it does and no, those three early career teachers were not an anomaly. Beginning teachers really do cut it.

We then broke our experienced teacher category into two (4-5 years and more than 5 years) and compared the CLASS scores of teachers in these groups with beginning teachers (0-3 years’ experience). This time there were significant differences with the 4-5 year experience group achieving significantly lower quality in three dimensions: Productivity, Instructional Learning Formats, and Negative Climate.

Importantly, there were very few participants in the 4-5 year experience group. While these findings do align with the possibility of a post three-year decline for some teachers, the findings should be interpreted with caution as extreme outliers can have a disproportionate influence on group means.

What’s the upshot?

We followed more than 200 students over six years and very few of their teachers declined participation. Their length of teacher experience ranged from 3 weeks to 38 years.

Basically, beginning teachers performed just as well as, or better than, teachers with more years of experience, regardless of the groups we compared them with. And, while all research is impacted by self-selection to some degree, in this study that was mitigated by our relationship with and presence in seven participating schools and the longitudinal nature of our project.

We found no evidence that beginning teachers were unprepared for the classroom or that they are bad at behaviour management. In fact, we found that most beginning teachers engaged in higher levels of emotional support than their more experienced colleagues. And behaviour management was the second highest scoring dimension of the 10 dimensions measured by the CLASS.

This evidence is good news for beginning teachers who must have been feeling pretty bruised in recent years and good news for preservice teachers who are scaling an increasing number of hurdles to prove their worth. It is also good news for teacher educators who work incredibly hard under enormous pressure to continually revise and refine their content and to support their students to do well.

Rather than implementing any more graduation hurdles designed to “vet” entry to the profession or further destabilising university teacher education, governments need to look at the evidence and turn instead to finding better ways of directing support to all teachers and provide intelligently targeted, quality professional learning to those who need it.

Professor Linda Graham is Director of The Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Linda is currently Chief Investigator on several externally funded research projects including “Which children develop severely disruptive school behaviour?”, a six-year longitudinal study funded by the Australian Research Council. She has published more than 80 books, chapters, and journal articles, as well as numerous pieces published in The Conversation.

Associate Professor Sonia White is an academic in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education and researcher in The Centre for Inclusive Education (C4IE) at QUT. Sonia is a registered mathematics teacher and her research investigates children’s early learning and development.

Dr Kathy Cologon is a senior lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University. Kathy has a particular interest in research and practice relating to the development and support of inclusive education, with a view towards greater recognition of the rights of all children.

Professor Robert Pianta is Dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and founding Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). He is a leading expert in the field of developmental psychology with much of his research devoted to supporting teachers use of quality teaching practices that best support children’s academic, social-emotional and behavioural development. With his colleagues at CASTL, he has led the development of well-known measures including the Teacher-Student Relationship Scale and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS).

The ignorance of our shared history is shocking. Morrison’s denial shows us time for truth-telling is NOW

June 22, 2020Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educationAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Australia Day debate, Blak histories, Blak people, initial teacher education, Scott Morrison, shared histories, slavery in Australia, Stolen Generations, Uluru Statement from the Heart

Never has the cultural gap been so evident. What I am talking about is the outright denial and whitewashing of the shared Australian history. The leader of colonial Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison proclaimed on commercial radio station 2GB that Australia was founded on the basis that there be no slavery. His failure to recall such histories as blackbirding or the forced indentured labour of Aboriginal peoples as domestic help or station hands after removal from family up until the 1960s has been rightly called out by historians and Aboriginal politicians.

As an Aboriginal academic and first and foremost, educationalist, it is shocking to hear the apologetic voices of others excusing the Prime Minister’s dismissal of our shared history. Such debates only further perpetuate the denial and divide within colonial Australia. In reaction to the outcry Scott Morrison backed away from his original assertion by saying “there have been all sorts of hideous practices that have taken place, and so I’m not denying any of that” and that his comments on 2GB “were not intended to give offence, and if they did I deeply regret that and apologise for that”.

But it has not only been this latest act of denial by the prime minister. The violence on Blak bodies in recent months has been an assault of endless proportions. Politicians enacting blow after blow through their mindless rhetoric and inept claims incite further violence against Blak people. But we should not be surprised with the contempt and disdain currently being hurled within politics and more pointedly, by the Prime Minister. The denial and ignorance has been evident since the now Prime Minister, Scott Morrison’s maiden speech to parliament on the 14^th of February, 2008. The day after the momentous Apology to the Stolen Generations proffered by then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, Morrison said:

“…we cannot allow a national obsession with our past failures to overwhelm our national appetite for celebrating our modern stories of nationhood”.

He was speaking at the time about his view of the Australian nation, “the product of more than 200 years of sacrifice”. One must ask just who or what was the sacrifice Morrison was referring to in this statement.

The erasure of Blak histories and peoples was littered throughout his speech where he suggested that Australia was “at peace with its past”. He continued stating that “this situation is not the result of any one act but of more than 200 years of shared ignorance, failed policies and failed communities”. A shared ignorance!? The outright dismissal of the Blak experience; the assimilatory properties of education where the sole purpose was to indoctrinate the Indigenous child into the ways of the coloniser – surely, the ignorance is not shared.

Indigenous peoples know the western world. We have been subjugated to learning the ways of the coloniser since 1788. It was the intent to ‘discipline the savage’, if I was to paraphrase the words of Professor Martin Nakata. The ignorance is not ours to bear.

Fast forward to 2018 when the debate about Australia Day was again being raised and Morrison was now the Prime Minister of Australia. He had maintained that the need for Australia Day to remain as it is as “you don’t pretend your birthday was on a different day”. He acknowledged that Australia’s national story had “a few scars” and that it was “not perfect”. He further tweeted that “being honest about the past does [make Australia stronger] – our achievements and our failings. We should not rewrite our history”.

A screenshot of a cell phone

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How ironic that in 2020 Morrison is doing exactly that!? Rewriting history to placate the fragility of the Australian public. Indentured labour is a euphemism for slavery in Australia. There was no choice. Aboriginal peoples and Pasifika peoples were not in a position to leave or change their conditions.

And yet, truth-telling is what the Uluru Statement fro m the Heart calls for. Truth-telling is exactly that. The truth must be told. Not a white-washed history of a nation built on the stolen lands of Indigenous peoples but the truth. And where better for that truth-telling to occur but in politics and in education. For if the plight of the Indigenous child in the shared Australian historical context proves anything, education has the power to effect change and to privilege or deny the truth.

The responsibilities of schools and universities

And so while the current leader continues to use his power, privilege and position to deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the respect and dignity that they deserve, I turn my lens to schools and Initial Teacher Education programs in all Australian universities and their power, privilege and position to ensure that such blatant ignorance does not continue.

Universities and schools have a responsibility to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures are embedded as well as privileged within their teaching and learning. Shifts in teacher education policy has made it explicit to teachers and systems the importance of addressing the cultural gap.

Classroom teachers and principals are required to demonstrate how they know students and how they learn as well as how they know the content and how to teach it. Embedded within these focus areas are explicit reference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and content. The onus in ensuring that graduating teachers are meeting the standards is placed on Initial Teacher Education programs and universities.

Some universities have met this challenge by ensuring that there is a mandatory Indigenous knowledges course within their programs university wide. There is recognition that doing so is beneficial not just for students but for society. Universities are further required to have an Indigenous Graduate attribute for all courses and programs.

In Initial Teacher Education, while it is not mandatory for a standalone course, the lack of cultural awareness on display of late surely illustrates the need for such a course. That is, if the leader of the country does not know the shared histories, how can we expect peoples who have received the same western education to know any different?

We can change it

Education is where we can effect change. Initial Teacher Education is where we can effect change within the education provided for all. We can work towards addressing the cultural gap. Surely, it is time.

It is time now to look to effect change, to work towards creating a world we want to live in. It is time to privilege and centre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, histories, cultures and peoples.

For far too long, the western education system has worked to have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to ‘fit in’ to their systems. It is time that the system looked at itself and hanged its head in shame with the power, privilege and position it has maintained and look towards creating a culturally inclusive and responsive society. The time is now.

Melitta Hogarth is a Kamilaroi woman who is Assistant Dean (Indigenous) in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at University of Melbourne. Prior to entering academia Melitta taught for almost 20 years in all three sectors of the Queensland education system specifically in Secondary education. Melitta’s interests are in education, equity and social justice. Her PhD titled “Addressing the rights of Indigenous peoples in education: A critical analysis of Indigenous education policy” was awarded the Ray Debus Award for Doctoral Research in Education. Melitta is on Twitter @melitta_hogarth

Do we need to raise scores for entry into teacher education courses in Australia?

November 28, 2017quality teachingentry levels for teacher education, Helen Boon, initial teacher education, teacher education standards, teaching standards

A fierce debate is raging at the moment in political and education circles about the quality of recruits into teaching courses. Universities claim that university courses can mould pre-service (student) teachers into classroom ready, quality teachers therefore students with lower entry scores should not be excluded.

On the other hand there is a popular political argument that universities need to raise entry levels to teacher education courses in order to lift the quality of teaching in Australia. The idea is if Australia had better teachers we would get better results, especially in international rankings of literacy and numeracy.

Labour’s education spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, joined the debate recently when she said entry standards for prospective teachers in Australia must be higher than they are currently because we need the cleverest candidates to instruct our children. She proposed incentives to get smarter students into teaching.

Several states, including NSW, are already imposing increased standards for entry to teaching courses, although there remains a lot of resistance from some universities.

I believe to meet the challenges of the future and to attract and retain high quality teachers, it is important for universities to understand pre-service teacher motivation and their development of those important teacher characteristics. So I decided to have a closer look at what is happening with our student teachers: whether higher entry levels make a difference and what effect teacher education courses have on the qualities that would make them ‘classroom ready’, such as self efficacy (that is belief in one’s own ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task), resilience and persistence.

My research shows that entry levels do indeed make a difference. It also shows, perhaps surprisingly, that current teacher education programs do not seem to be influencing the major characteristics important to teachers that recruits bring into the course at entry point.

How attributes and dispositions are currently included in selection criteria

As Plibersek pointed out, entry-level grades into teacher training courses have been on a downward trend since 2006. Data show that high school marks for prospective teaching students have declined over the past 10 years. However during this time there has been an increased interest in the characteristics and attributes, other than entry score to university courses, of successful teachers.

These characteristics are recognised in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers that drive initial teaching education course curriculum planning and policy, and determine whether pre-service (student) teachers and graduates are classroom ready. As well as literacy and numeracy benchmarks pre-service teachers must show they meet seven standards and sub-standards. These standards are underpinned by an emphasis on empathy and ethical dispositions and a set of skills that result from resourcefulness and adroit capacity to motivate students.

Selection criteria into initial teacher education courses now aim to draw upon the most suitable candidates by ascertaining these dispositional attributes. Universities contend that these attributes and dispositions go beyond academic grades and are more important because teaching, like medicine, is considered to be a vocation not merely a profession.

My study

I wanted to look more closely at what was happening with student teachers: whether university study made a difference to their personal attributes and whether their entry scores made a difference to whether they would complete their course or not. We know that a large proportion of pre-service teachers drop out of their courses before completing their qualification for a range of reasons.

My study tracked a cohort of 190 pre-service teachers enrolled in a B.Ed. degree or a Graduate Diploma of Education from their first semester at university through to their final year or when they left or completed the course. I surveyed the undergraduates several times, beginning with a survey at the end of their first semester at university and then every semester till the end of their 3^rd year, a year prior to graduating. The post-graduate pre-service teachers were surveyed at the end of the first semester at university.

The surveys assessed a number of goals and character traits, such as the students’ resilience and persistence, as well as their self-efficacy for various aspects of teaching. This was based on the hypothesis that these attributes would change and develop as a result of their university training. Survey results were Rasch analysed and then imputed into structural equation models to examine the links between the survey factors and timely course completion.

As I had records of all students, including those who dropped out or did not complete the course, the characteristics of those who changed courses or dropped out were also analysed and compared to those who completed their degree.

My results show what makes a difference

My results showed no significant differences between undergraduate and post-graduate students’ self-efficacy, resilience and persistence and no significant differences in these characteristics between those who completed their degrees and those who did not.

So teacher education and a student’s experience at university did not influence those important aspects of character that are considered to be highly desirable of quality teachers. Therefore it is important that we do indeed select those who are already focused on achieving their goals and are already persistent.

However those character traits had no effect upon timely degree completion. What mattered as far as timely completion were the student’s grades. Higher grades and goal directedness were the strongest predictors of a timely completion. Post-graduate pre-service teachers were more likely than undergraduates to complete their course and within the undergraduate cohort those specialising in Early Childhood Education were least likely to complete their degree.

So indeed entry scores make a difference in whether a student is likely to successfully complete their teaching degree. Those students with higher scores and those who already have a degree are more likely to complete. Those with lower scores are more likely to drop out.

These findings pose a number of questions in relation to pre-service teacher recruitment and training. For instance: How do we best support and motivate aspiring preservice teachers throughout their degree courses to keep them engaged? What critical personal attributes of preservice teachers ensure that they have the capacity and resilience to complete their degree? Are there contextual factors that impact upon preservice teacher completion rates and how do they vary by specialisation?

More significantly my findings indicate that perhaps prospective teacher recruits need to have higher entry scores than are currently required by some universities, irrespective of other dispositional attributes, if they are to graduate and enter the profession.

Helen Boon is Associate Professor in the College of Arts, Society & Education at James Cook University. She is Head of Curriculum and Pedagogy in Education. She teaches in the areas of educational psychology, special needs and behaviour management. Helen has a strong research interest in climate change and the intersection of ethics, climate change and adaptation to climate change. Helen initially trained in Chemistry and Physiology and then taught Chemistry and Mathematics for a number of years. Her preferred research methods are quantitative, including statistical modelling and Rasch modelling. Helen has led a number of projects: a WIL project with partners from the School of Medicine, a Collaboration Across Boundaries Project with the School of Public Health, Tropical Medicine and Rehabilitation Sciences, and an NCCARF funded project with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Charles Sturt University. Helen is currently working on an ARC funded project examining the most effective pedagogies for Indigenous students. Recent publications include a longitudinal study about climate change education and pre-service teacher attitudes and a paper about the dearth of ethics training in preservice teacher programs across Australia.

Helen is reporting on her research at the 2017 AARE conference today.

2017 AARE Conference

The theme of the 2017 AARE conference is ‘Education: What’s politics got to do with it?’ There will be over 600 presentations of current educational research and panel sessions at the conference which runs all this week in Canberra. Journalists who want to attend or arrange interviews please contact Anna Sullivan, Communications Manager of AARE, Anna.Sullivan@unisa.edu.au or our editor Maralyn Parker, maralyn@aare.edu.au

Follow the conference on Twitter #AARE2017

*NOTE to readers and bloggers. Our Facebook and LinkedIn shares are not showing in Firefox. Our tech people are on the case.

The four challenges Australia faces to improve the digital literacy of new teachers

April 3, 2017Teacher educationdigital literacies, digital literacy of pre-service teachers, initial teacher education, Jane Hunter, NESA, teacher digital literacy

The digital literacy of pre-service teachers was put in the spotlight recently. A report on the review of teaching information and communication technologies in initial teacher education received considerable media attention when new NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, released it.

The 49-page report, if you’d like to read it, is largely positive. However when Minister Stokes announced the report he spoke about “the need to better prepare teachers for an increasingly digital and online world.” So discussion that followed in the media quickly degenerated into conversation about the deficits in teacher education in NSW.

I wish we wouldn’t do that. Why is there always a need to lay blame, and why is initial teacher education often the scapegoat?

The report makes seven recommendations for initial teacher education. They are full of jargon and the language quite dense to any non-teacher. But suffice to say the review recommends that teacher education institutions should give priority to the digital literacy of their pre-service teachers as well as teaching them how to integrate technology into the curriculum. It emphasizes mentoring, and the provision of examples of best practice.

I am not here to critique those recommendations in particular (although I do wonder who sat on the ‘expert panel’ that made them, as the review does not tell us). What I want to do – as a former teacher in schools, researcher in classrooms and frequent teacher educator in universities in the field of technology enhanced learning – is talk about some of the challenges faced in teaching digital literacy skills to pre-service teachers and more generally to students in NSW schools.

The four challenges

Connectivity

Connectivity is still not consistent in many NSW public schools. Being able to connect every time, and quickly, is difficult. When I taught in a rural university in the US in late 2015 and visited various schools this was not the case. It was, to use a favourite word from the review, “seamless”. It must be easy every time in our schools.

Until having a seamless connection in every school is given proper attention and becomes a funding priority, teachers (especially new graduate teachers) will continue to be reluctant to base their lesson on something that depends on being connected. The fear, of course, is of their lesson falling apart. Some new graduate teachers do risk it and succeed; others try it but have a back up plan if they can’t connect readily the first time. But really, this should not be an issue in 2017.

Funding for professional development

Each large rollout of technology in NSW public schools (I am thinking of the Connected Classrooms Program in particular) was not accompanied by adequate funds for teacher professional development. There were newsletters with school-based case studies and some online materials. However, schools/teachers/principals were left to search for what they needed.

In the case of the federal government’s Digital Education Revolution (DER) there was hardware and a technical support officer but no dedicated funds for professional development or ongoing teacher professional learning.

This is critical in the tech space as obsolescence arrives fast and the ever-evolving state of tech means you must continually keep up to date.

Many tech companies have come into schools sold their products and left. There was scope in these two technology programs to work with teacher education; several did it quite well providing skills training for interactive whiteboards for pre-service teachers and some in content management systems. And of course, many of the larger tech companies did iPad deals with universities. But initial teacher education was peripheral to most of the exchanges.

The latest report seems to call for more ‘clinical training’. This could and does occur within preparation in subject disciplines. However in initial teacher education we not only teach with tech in our courses/units but we must also model it in terms of how pre-service teachers can construct deep learning alongside content for students in schools.

In the unit I am teaching at UTS this semester, in the Master of Teaching Program, I am reaching out to ‘teachers in the field’ to share what they do in secondary English. We connect via Skype or a Google Hangout each week. My students perfect and share a new tech app/tool/device that pedagogically fosters learning within their discipline. I prototype other technologies in unit content and last semester in the Digital Learning for a Digital Generation unit we focused on theory and effective technology enhanced learning practices in subject disciplines. We concluded the semester with a series of TeachMeets with excellent local in-service teachers as keynote speakers.

Develop digital fluency

A third challenge for initial teachers education is around suitable frameworks to develop pre-service and in-service teachers’ digital fluency. At the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) conference in Austin, Texas two weeks ago I learned that initial teacher education colleagues from a university in The Netherlands are using case studies to build confidence in digital skills and teaching practices in their pre-service teachers. They too found their teachers unable to connect digital literacy skills with theory and practice in classrooms in Dutch schools.

The case studies being used are those of some exemplary teachers from NSW public schools. Data collected in research over two years for these Dutch pre-service teacher cohorts shows this approach has impact. I can certainly enable access to the papers if people are interested.

In addition, a draft document detailing 12 teacher educator technology competencies was previewed. These are well worth consideration. Another peak technology in education association in the US with whom our local computer in education associations work, released a set of teacher standards in 2016. You could check these out.

In the digital literacy report, in addition to mentioning the technology framework of TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) and SAMR (Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition ) there is scope to include the framework of High Possibility Classrooms an Australian example of a robust, validated pedagogical scaffold for technology enhanced learning for pre-service and in-service teachers. Several NSW public schools have High Possibility Classrooms in their strategic plans and in Victoria and the ACT; primary and secondary schools are finding it fills a much-needed gap in the how and why and why not of technology enhanced learning.

Educators involved with initial teacher education need continuous hands on experiences in schools

The fourth challenge is to find a way for those involved in initial teacher education to spend time in contemporary classrooms. Many do and I acknowledge that.

Here is a radical idea: the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) could work with initial teacher education institutions to find placements in schools or classrooms for teacher educators for a minimum of five days in every year. It would be an internship of sorts. Or is that one step too far?

I believe initial teacher education is doing its work in NSW but, yes, there is more to do. It is an important conversation for us to have.

Dr Jane Hunter is an education researcher in technology enhanced learning the School of Education, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She is conducting a series of STEM studies focused on building teacher capacity; in this work she leads teachers, school principals, students and communities to better understand and support education change. Jane was a senior education officer/advisor in the NSW Department of Education for seven years, and in her work in initial teacher education at three NSW universities has received national and international teaching awards for outstanding contributions to student learning. She enjoys writing and her research-based presentations at national and international conferences challenge audiences to consider alternate education possibilities. This Wednesday evening at the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences she is a NSW finalist for STEM communication in FameLab.

You can follow her on Twitter @janehunter01

NSW Education Standards Authority: is this new authority genuine reform or political spin?

September 5, 2016educational reform, NSW Education Standards Authority, school reformAITSL, BOSTES, Donna Pendergast, educational refiorm, initial teacher education, Nan Bahr, NSW Education Standards Authority, school reform, school registration, teacher accreditation, teacher education, teaching standards

A key recommendation of the recently released Review of the NSW Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES) is a call for “a more risk based approach to the Authority’s regulatory work”.

The BOSTES, renamed in the review as the NSW Education Standards Authority, is the authority that governs school education standards in New South Wales, including standards for curriculum, teaching and assessment, as well as school and teacher registration. So in this context ‘risk’ is an alarming concept. For us it conjured images of failing students with damaged futures in the hands of ill-prepared and incompetent teachers.

It was this mention of risk that made us particularly interested in the review, and what it might mean for us as teacher educators. We make the point here that while the review was written to guide developments in NSW, neighbouring jurisdictions in Queensland, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia also will be paying attention. Teacher candidates and teacher graduates are very mobile these days. Changes in NSW will have a ripple effect.

We discovered the review does not suggest NSW students or schools are failing. Indeed the opening comment of the Overview synopsis states “The review found there is confidence in education standards…”

So where is the risk? We decided to search for what the panel might conceive as risks. We used backward mapping from the review’s recommendations, to try to infer the risks involved. But first we looked at who was involved and who was consulted in the writing of this review.

The voice of teacher educators is largely missing

The three-member review panel held 105 consultations with organisations and individuals, but only 10 could loosely be thought of as involving teacher educators because of their connection with the Education faculties of universities. However, initial teacher education is not the only exercise of Education faculties, so indeed the connection between these 10 and actual teacher education programs and their design and implementation isn’t at all clear.

The 4,722 survey respondents comprised “principals, teachers, parents and students”. So teacher educators were not represented there either.

The review made 13 recommendations; several of these directly or indirectly affect our work as teacher educators.

The call for clarity and streamlining

The first recommendation is that education standards in NSW need to be reorganised. The argument is this is necessary to provide “greater clarity of regulatory roles and responsibilities and streamlined processes and systems” (p.5). The inference is that such clarity doesn’t exist and that processes are not clear. The regulatory processes are reported as “administratively burdensome”.

As we saw it, this is the first ‘risk’ we uncovered. We’ll call it Risk #1. It is that valuable time will be wasted and complex layers of processes and regulatory requirements will constipate vital reform.

As far as teacher education goes national authorities impose many of the processes so these cannot be part of the state’s streamlining process. Perhaps the streamlining could be of the additional requirements that NSW itself requires.

However there is no suggestion in the review that the extra layers imposed by NSW for initial teacher education accreditation should be removed. The new authority will still require initial teacher education accreditation and teacher registration to have unique NSW state based requirements. These will continue to be piled upon the rigorous national processes and requirements of AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership), ACECQA (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority) and TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency).

It’s hard to imagine how a call for streamlining and unburdening might work without some attempt at removing the layers of additional state-based processes and requirements.

So this appears to be an empty recommendation. Let’s move on to another inferred risk.

Teacher quality

The review focuses on teacher quality, and declares that teacher accreditation should remain the responsibility of teacher accreditation authorities. Setting the registration/accreditation of individual teachers aside, if there was respect for the national authorities, then the story should have just ended there. But the review highlights a need for “risk based auditing” of “Teacher Accreditation Authorities for ongoing quality assurance” (p. 33).

In other words, the review panel seems to be dissatisfied, or at least lacks trust, in the effectiveness of the national teacher accreditation authorities’ to exercise their role. This is a clanger. The NSW BOSTES leaders have been at the table for the development of the nationally consistent teacher accreditation policies and processes since they were birthed.

The report indeed acknowledges this by detailing the “engagement with the Education Council and inter-government forums” (p. 33) and declaring the NSW BOSTES as a partner in developments at national levels.

But whatever the inference is here, there are some well-crafted soothing words for the benefit of the national accrediting authorities in the following statement:

“It is the Review Panel’s view that, unless there is a material difference in policy and New South Wales is setting specific and higher standards, the Authority (BOSTES) should not reproduce existing resources” (p. 33).

So what is the risk being conjured up? Is it that fine and well-designed teacher education programs might not emerge from the nationally consistent and rigorous accreditation processes? This is an unlikely risk for NSW, especially given the ongoing input NSW BOSTES has had in creating those national frameworks.

Therefore, sadly, it is more likely that we have identified Risk #2: that BOSTES will not be able to maintain control of the nationally consistent accreditation requirements. It needs to do this to sufficiently satisfy the local electorates that NSW offers bespoke education.

Another key recommendation under the heading of teacher quality is that “the authority’s oversight of initial teacher education provision… is strengthened” (p. 35). Yet again this smacks of distrust of the nationally consistent processes and policies, but also of distrust of the quality and motives of teacher education providers.

Compounding this is the review’s call for “the power to place conditions on the approval of ITE programs and the suspension and revocation of program approvals” (p. 35). We can only wonder about all of that.

Final school practicum

Specific attention is given to the final school practicum in an initial teacher education program (Recommendation 6, p. 36). This is when student teachers do their last supervised teaching in classrooms before they graduate. We believe it is seen as the greatest of all risks. We identified it as Risk #3: that incompetent graduate teachers might attain teacher accreditation due to ineffective assessment of their capabilities in the final practicum.

So, the review panel wants the new NSW Education Standards Authority to have power over whether an initial teacher education program can continue to be offered, and it will depend on whether pre-service teachers graduating from that program meet particular standards set for the final practicum. This is a truly big stick, and only possible as a recommendation from a Review panel (and suite of stakeholder consultations) that did not feature a strong representation from teacher education specialists.

If teacher educators had been given a fair voice in this review they would have explained the wicked problems of equitable final practicum assessment. The enduring fact is that classrooms are not all the same, teacher supervisors are not all the same and schools are not all the same. Pre-service teachers will teach in different levels of schooling in different regions, and with extremely divergent ranges and mixes of socioeconomic, cultural and community factors.

The story of one provider of initial teacher education, just over the border from New South Wales, explains the scope of what we are talking about. Griffith University in Queensland is our university so we confidently use it as an example to provide insight into the scale of the exercise. In 2015, Griffith placed 2639 students into school practicum at 458 schools, including some in other parts of Australia, amounting to 60,531 days of practicum which is the equivalent of 166 years. Yes 166 years for just one university. While these were not all final practicum experiences, the scale of the exercise is a powerful message about the potential for this strategy to go awry.

In Queensland, all three education sectors, together with the ten higher education institutions and the Queensland College of Teachers, have collaborated to ensure a consistent approach to final professional experience performance and evaluation. The Queensland Professional Experience Reporting Framework is a result of that collaboration. Perhaps taking a look at this might be useful.

One final practicum is not a good measure

With this in mind, many teacher educators believe performance in one final practicum is not an appropriate bar to measure the effectiveness of an entire initial teacher education program. That is, unless and until:

There is a greater sharing of the responsibilities for mentoring and development of pre-service teachers at the coalface, in the classroom.
There are reliable approaches to moderation of practicum evaluation.
There are specialist teachers in school that understand their role as site based teacher educators and who work in partnership with the university teacher educators.

The greatest risk

We believe the review should have seen past what might look good for politicians and or what could be used to generate simplistic “good” media coverage. A focus far more important should have been how the teacher educator sector might participate in ways of working more effectively and professionally together and how they might improve their connections with classroom teachers and schools.

The greatest risk is fussing over who has control, and who can find the best “spin” to give reforms, is distracting us from our most important collective job; that is teaching students how to succeed as learners and to be productive and positive members of society.

In all, the BOSTES Review is disappointing. It adds bricks to the already existing walls between initial teacher education and the rest of the education sector. Its recommendations are framed in ways that reinforce negative regard and disrespect for initial teacher education and those of us who work in the sector.

As we see it an unhealthy focus on risk aversion (not risk taking at all) constructs a punitive environment that separates the people in education who should be working together to raise standards. To do that effectively the voices of teacher educators should be heard.

It is about time the authorities in charge of school standards in NSW stop referring to “stakeholders” and start talking about “partners”.

Here is the full Review of the NSW Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES)

Professor Nan Bahr is Dean (Learning and Teaching) for the Arts, Education and Law Group at the Griffith Univerity. She is responsible for the quality of design and implementation of programs across the Arts, Education and Law Group, both undergraduate and postgraduate and development programs, including higher degree research and coursework. The role works with the Pro Vice Chancellor with decision making responsibilities regarding students issues and applications.

Prior to joining Griffith University in 2015, Nan was Assistant Dean (Teaching and Learning) and Professor of Education for the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology. This position followed from her role as Director Teacher Education with the University of Queensland. Nan has a background as a Secondary School teacher for Sciences, and the Arts, particularly Music. Nan holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and Music Education from the University of Queensland and has postgraduate and undergraduate degrees majoring in Biology, Music, Special Needs Education, and Educational Psychology.

Professor Bahr has a national and international profile for educational research with over 100 publications including four books (one a best seller). Key research has been in the fields of music education, educational psychology, teacher education, adolescence, resilience, and teaching innovation in higher education. As a University Teacher, she has been awarded the University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Teaching, has been a finalist (twice) for the Australian Awards for University Teaching, and has been awarded for extended service with the Australian Defence Force.

Professor Donna Pendergast is Dean of the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University. She has an international profile in the field of middle years education. She is actively involved in policy discussions regarding quality teaching and is the Chair of the Queensland Council of Deans of Education.