The six steps to better teachers for Australia’s school systems
A young teacher fresh out of university stands at the front of her first classroom (they usually are women), facing a group of 25 or so expectant Year 5 students. Her first task is wrangling such a large group of children; most parents struggle with two or three. But that is easy compared to the professional challenges of effectively teaching every child in her class. In the average Year 5 class, some students will still be performing at a Year 2 level, yet others will be stretching into the work of high school while the rest will be at various points in between.
Yet the initial teacher education teachers receive at university generally fails to provide them with essential skills. Teachers are thrown in front of a classroom and left to sink or swim. Some are excellent in spite of their teacher training, not because of it. For each student to learn to the best of their ability, teachers must quickly be able to use their formative and summative assessment skills to identify a child’s learning needs and then develop curriculum and teaching strategies to - address each of those needs. To achieve this, teachers must have high-level skills in educational theory and child development, and use a wide range of general and subject-specific teaching skills. This requires deep knowledge of their subject area. Maths teachers, for example, must have strong mathematical knowledge and capabilities to assess and teach every child properly. On top of this, teachers must be able to evaluate continually the impact of their teaching on every student to ensure the cycle of teaching and learning is constantly improving. None of this is easy. To pull it off, teachers require a sophisticated and complex set of skills that too often they have not been taught during their education degree. It is no wonder that early- -career teachers leave the profession and that Australian children are not learning as fast as they should. Hopefully, this is about to change.
Governments across the nation are considering reforms that could fundamentally change initial teacher education, enabling improvements to the quality of education our young people receive in this and future generations.
But reforming universities — where most teachers are initially educated — is incredibly difficult. A toxic reform debate, with opponents trading insults and continually focusing on the wrong areas, is not helping. The debate is pushing policymakers into the same sorts of reforms of initial teacher education that have continually failed in other areas — policies that increase regulation and government control of the factors that make little difference to the quality of the teacher produced.
Learning First, a Melbourne-based organisation that specialises in education reform, training and policy, is working with a number of education systems around the world to improve their teachers. Many countries share similar concerns of declining quality of initial teacher education. All share the problem of how to get highly autonomous universities to improve their training programs and align them with government plans to improve school education.
The way forward is to rise above polarising debates and recognise the true problems in teacher development, the idiosyncrasies of the sector and the impact of these, and reforms that best develop and support teachers in a complex profession. Learning First’s report A new approach: Reforming teacher education, released today, shows how improvements in initial teacher education can be achieved. It finds that reforms are more effective when they focus on the later stages of teacher education, closer to when teachers seek their first job in schools, rather than upon selection into education degrees. The report highlights the current situation that gives universities financial incentives to provide poor quality, low-cost teacher education and how this can be changed. Importantly, it details the various reform options available to government and how they can play out in various systems. I was a member of the federal government’s Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, which recently handed its recommendations to Education Minister Christopher Pyne. The advisory group received submissions from all parts of the education sector on how to improve teacher education, and made abundantly clear severe deficiencies in teacher education, including:
A lack of evidence-based content: Many teaching courses are training future teachers in practices that are out of date and not backed by research. The problems with this cannot be understated. Even the hardest working teacher cannot help students learn if they are equipped with ineffective strategies.
Inadequate subject knowledge training: Too many teaching courses lack rigorous training in specific subject knowledge. The best systems around the world do not just screen teaching candidates for such knowledge on entry into a course, they also integrate rigorous study of the subject throughout the program. Teachers need an indepth knowledge of a subject to instruct students effectively, particularly when students are struggling to understand. Teachers with a poor grasp of the subject find it difficult to reframe lessons to meet the learning needs of all students.
An insufficient focus on skills for clinical teaching practice: Great teachers must continually evaluate and develop their own practice. Fundamental to this is the ability to assess the impact of their teaching on student learning. Unfortunately, very few teaching programs equip beginner teachers with the skills to collect data on student progress and analyse the information to adjust and improve their teaching approach. Even the best teaching programs will not be able to prepare teachers for everything they need to know. That is why these clinical practice skills are essential to ensuring teachers can adapt to different student needs and make sure all students are learning.
Limited practice: Teachers see the practical experience in a school as the most useful part of their training. Effectively linking teaching theories to classroom practice is critical to developing beginner teachers. But there is a lack of feedback between schools and many universities, which results in teachers struggling in their first years in the classroom. Some universities are clearly avoiding their responsibilities altogether, and student teachers are forced to cold-call schools to find practical training placements.
First published in The Australian, 28 March 2015