Steve Murphy Archives

Teacher readiness in hard-to-staff schools – here’s what we know now

In current policy debates about graduate teacher readiness in Australian schools, one central question is often overlooked: how does the diversity of school contexts impact the specific needs and expectations placed on graduate teachers?

Recognising this diversity is crucial for tailoring teacher education programs and support systems to better equip new teachers for the realities of schools, especially those that struggle with hiring and retaining teachers. These schools, broadly described as hard-to-staff, serve diverse communities with distinct socio-economic, cultural, and geographic characteristics that can profoundly impact teaching and learning dynamics.

In our study, we wanted to know what teacher readiness means from the vantage point of these schools. To answer this question, we conducted interviews with 17 principals from a range of hard-to-staff schools across Victoria. Their voices echoed concerns often overshadowed by broad-strokes policy discussions about ‘classroom-ready teachers’.

One-Size-Doesn’t-Fit-All

The rhetoric surrounding ‘classroom readiness’ often hinges on a logic of uniformity and standardisation. It is based on the assumption that a teacher who has met defined standards and possesses knowledge of specific content is ready to work in any setting.

This approach obscures a reality that is far more complex than is readily acknowledged. Teaching requires exercising professional judgement about what works in response to student needs and community context.

As one principal from a regional hard-to-staff school in our study remarked:

“I feel that some students want to walk in feeling curriculum competent, that they know the curriculum and they can talk ‘the learning outcomes’ and use that departmental speak, and that makes them feel or believe or behave more like teachers? Perhaps that’s their perception. But the reality is that when you get into a community, and you’ve got 20 students to manage, that curriculum knowledge, it’s so secondary to the skills that has to be in place so that these children have someone that can look to, that co-regulates them, supports them, makes them feel safe, and then once they’re ready to learn, meets them at their need.

And it’s that idea that if you’ve got the curriculum knowledge, sometimes I feel that the student teachers come in thinking that one size fits all this approach that I’ve seen, or has been modelled through me, or that has been unpacked with me will translate to every school and not into my setting.”

An appreciation of diversity

The principal’s comment highlights a crucial point: A one-size-fits-all approach fails to acknowledge that readiness to teach involves more than merely adhering to a set of standardised practices. It requires an appreciation of diversity, an awareness of the distinct dynamics within each classroom, and the ability to address the particular needs of students and the broader community.

This is not to dismiss the value of specific forms of knowledge for teachers. In fact, such knowledge is vital in defining and distinguishing teaching as a professional field. The argument here is for practising professional judgement and leveraging contextual insights to determine what works best, for whom, under what conditions and why. Such a capacity is the hallmark of readiness for a profession that prioritises responsiveness to the unique needs of students in each classroom.

Recognising complexity and diversity in teacher readiness

Drawing on insights shared by principals in our research, we revisited the debate on classroom readiness with a focus on questions about ‘context’. From low socioeconomic outer-metropolitan areas to regional centres to small rural communities, each school in our study presented unique opportunities and challenges to the workforce.

Paying attention to context creates valuable opportunities for ‘learning to teach’ as a situated process that involves continuous learning, reflective practice, and adaptable strategies, all of which must be tailored to the specific challenges and strengths of each school environment. In the words of another principal:

“You’ve got to come in with confidence and humility and the ability to say ‘I’m at the start of my journey, and I’m looking forward to being mentored in your school. I want to grow in your school.”

An approach that begins with the actual conditions of schools reveals the limitations of standardised approaches in teacher preparation. It highlights the need to embrace complexity, value connection to the community and understand context as the foundation for any discussions about what readiness for the profession ought to look like.

Crafting a new narrative

A decade on from the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) review, we are back to square one, blaming teacher education as both the cause and the solution for ‘mixed’ educational outcomes for Australian students in international comparisons.

If the lesson of the past is anything to go by, one thing should be clear: teacher education reform must account for and integrate the complexities of the real world. At their core, reform models of teacher education must reflect the diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional factors that impact teaching and learning.

The Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper acknowledged the importance of ensuring teachers are prepared for their communities. Disappointingly this essential aspect was largely disregarded in the final Strong Beginnings Report.

Narrow focus

A narrow focus on ‘classroom readiness’ limits teacher activity and discourages engagement with broader context. Therefore, we echo the calls for a more comprehensive approach that expands discussions on readiness beyond the classroom to encompass context. This approach derives its direction for policy reform of teacher education from the specific needs of schools and their communities.

As our research findings help demonstrate, such an approach emphasises open-mindedness, flexibility, cultural responsiveness, and genuine collaboration between schools and universities to create a more sustainable and effective pathway for preparing teachers to meet the diverse needs of their students and the community.

From left to right:

Babak Dadvand is as a senior lecturer in pedagogy, professional practice, and teacher education at La Trobe University with expertise on social justice education. His work extends to staffing challenges in the hardest-to-staff schools and effective practices in school-university partnership in Initial Teacher Education.

Juliana Ryan teaches professional ethics in the School of Education at La Trobe University. She uses participatory, narrative and discursive approaches to research professional and academic identities, post-secondary transitions, professional learning and social learning systems.

Miriam Tanti is professor and associate dean, partnership and executive director of the Nexus Program at La Trobe University’s School of Education. Her research focuses on university-school partnerships, with a particular focus on communities of practice. Her other area of interest is in the meaningful integration of technologies in education.

Steve Murphy is director of Rural and Regional Education Engagement at La Trobe University’s School of Education. His research focuses on strengths approaches to rural education, with particular interest in teacher preparation, school leadership and STEM education.

We can teach it so much better once we know what it is

‘Critical’ and ‘creative’ are commonly used terms, but shared understandings of these terms are less frequent. Critical and creative thinking (CCT) refers to two broad types of thinking that manifest in different ways and draw upon different combinations of knowledge and skills depending on the context and purpose. This explains the many slightly differing definitions you will find attached to the terms if you go looking. Boiled down, critical thinking means evaluating ideas (especially claims and arguments), tools, methods, or products in reasoned ways, while creative thinking means making mental connections between and generating new ideas, tools, methods, or products for an intended effect. They’re different types of thinking but go well together. We believe developing young people’s CCT is a key purpose of education – and that teachers should be taught to teach CCT in a ‘deliberately incidental’ way.

CCT is not just important for Australia to stay internationally competitive or because there is increasing demand for employees with CCT skills. Thinking creatively and critically makes our world, and the lives we live, better. CCT gives meaning to much of what students learn at school. The OECD attributes such importance to CCT that it is introducing a standardised assessment of CCT this year. And of course, ACARA sees its importance, too; CCT is one of the seven General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum.

So, it was with interest that we noted the findings of a recently published study by Carter and Buchanan. The 185 NSW primary teachers they surveyed agreed that the General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum (Version 8.4) – which include CCT – were important, but the teachers were not confident in their knowledge of these capabilities. Almost half of the teachers reported that they did not understand the General Capabilities. Most reported teaching the General Capabilities only occasionally or not at all; and of the 37 teachers who were interviewed in the study, only 2 said they taught General Capabilities explicitly.

Of all the reported excerpts about how Carter and Buchanan’s interviewees said they taught the General Capabilities, several of the General Capabilities were referenced but there was not a single mention of teaching CCT. The teachers cited – understandably – that a lack of professional development was the impediment to their understanding of the General Capabilities. It is not surprising that teachers would struggle with CCT particularly, given questions about the adequacy of teacher education in relation to teaching CCT.

A lack of clarity about CCT is pervasive. The more you read in this area, whether it is the scholarly literature or the grey literature, the more you can be forgiven for wondering if there is any kind of thinking that CCT does not include! We see the lack of definitional clarity around CCT as a significant barrier to confident and effective CCT teaching – but not an obstacle that quality teacher education and professional development cannot help teachers to overcome.

We argue that helping teachers to develop a deep understanding of CCT (much deeper than we can cover in this post) is important because of what well-established educational psychology principles – drawing on cognitive, social, and behavioural psychology – tell us. Only when teachers deeply understand the conceptual structures of CCT will they be able to teach CCT effectively.

Higher-order skills such as CCT are not the product of natural maturation and social interactions, and can therefore be thought of as biologically secondary skills. Cognitive psychology tells us that biologically secondary knowledge and skills should be taught explicitly, in order for the learning to be efficient and effective. This means that to most effectively develop students’ CCT, teachers need to teach CCT deliberately. This involves drawing attention to, explaining, and illustrating the concepts and skills involved (e.g., for critical thinking these might include evaluate, reason, argument, analyse, evidence, logic, conclusion, or the term critical itself; for creative thinking these might include imagination, brainstorm, open-minded, flexible, method, adapt, concept map, synthesise, or the term creative itself). The particular concepts, skills, explanations, and demonstrations will, of course, depend on the learners’ development, prior learning, and interests, and the learning area (or domain) knowledge being drawn on.

Cognitive psychology also tells us that CCT skills are not ‘generic strategies’, learnable in a content vacuum; they require content knowledge. To teach CCT in a knowledge-based way, teachers need to have a particularly deep understanding of CCT – so they can recognise and harness as many opportunities as possible to teach CCT skills utilising the domain knowledge they are teaching. Only by doing this as often as possible, in as many different learning areas as possible, can teachers encourage learners to engage in CCT habitually and ‘generally’. CCT skills taught in isolated CCT focused programs – if new skills are learned at all – do not generalise.

Social and behavioural psychology has much to contribute to teachers’ ability to establish CCT as socially normative thinking practices. To encourage children (and the adults they become) to engage in CCT in the various situations where it’s desirable to do so, teachers should frequently and explicitly model CCT skills, drawing attention to and labelling the specific skills they are using; provide plentiful and varied opportunities for learners to engage in the skills themselves, prompting and guiding where necessary; and try to ensure that the learners feel good (natural positive reinforcement) when they engage in those skills.

By taking a developmentally appropriate cognitive, social, and behavioural approach to teaching CCT – a ‘deliberately incidental’ approach – teachers can teach students not only what it means to think creatively and critically, but also that these are expected and valued ways of thinking. However, if teachers don’t have a deep understanding of what CCT is, they can’t fully harness the power of educational psychology principles to maximise the development of their students’ CCT. We believe that improved teacher education and professional development is needed to help many teachers feel confident enough to teach CCT in knowledge-based, explicit, and socially normalising ways.

We hope that any introduction of standardised testing of CCT skills encourages a more widespread focus on knowledge-based, explicit teaching of CCT. The OECD’s assertion that the “PISA assessment will examine students’ capacities to generate diverse and original ideas, and to evaluate and improve ideas, across a range of contexts” gives us some hope. Whether or not standardised testing of CCT is introduced in Australia, we hope all Australian teachers will get the support they need to develop a deep understanding of CCT and ‘deliberately incidental’ CCT pedagogies.

Overall, we hope that, in the future, all teachers will feel well prepared to teach CCT in a way that contributes to a society in which thinking creatively and critically in all domains of life is the wonderful norm.

From left to right: Kylie Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology and Pedagogy at La Trobe University’s School of Education. Her background includes secondary teaching in science, psychology, and relationships education, and university teaching in research literacy, critical evidence-based practice, and pragmatic research methodology. Kylie is passionate about critically-informed teaching, including finding ways to support more inclusive and effective teaching of CCT. Follow her on Twitter @KylieMurphyEd or on LinkedIn. Steve Murphy is the Director of Professional Practice & School Partnerships at La Trobe University’s School of Education. He has extensive experience as a STEM educator and educational leader in schools. He researches rural education, with a particular focus on STEM education in rural schools and preparing teachers to work in rural communities. Follow Steve on LinkedIn or on Twitter @MurphyRuralEd. Nathaniel Swain is a teacher, instructional coach, and researcher with expertise in language, literacy, instructional practices, and cognitive science. He founded the national community of teachers and registered charity called Think Forward Educators, and produces a regular blog for teachers known as the Cognitorium. Nathaniel currently teaches Foundation at Brandon Park Primary, where he is also a Science of Learning Specialist. He is excited to be joining La Trobe University’s School of Education as a Senior Lecturer in January 2023. Follow him on LinkedIn or on Twitter@NathanielRSwain.