policy & reform
The
future of teacher
education
It’ s time to set higher standards in the teacher education system. By Field Rickards
It is not difficult to figure out why there has been so much attention devoted to teacher education lately.
ATARs for entry to teacher education programs nationally vary widely and the quality of entrants into undergraduate teacher education is steadily falling. This lowers the esteem in which society holds the profession and deters bright students from studying teaching.
Furthermore, we have an over-supply of teaching graduates( particularly in primary and secondary humanities), which is being exacerbated by the demand driven system for undergraduate university places.
While it could be argued these graduates are contributing towards the government’ s higher education participation goals, the system is also letting down hundreds of them who fail to find employment in their chosen field. Some would also argue this oversupply also constitutes a waste of public money.
However, as educators know, teachers have the biggest in-school influence on students’ learning outcomes and their professional preparation is vitally important. Governments are right to focus on getting the best people into teaching degrees, and ensuring their preparation is of a high standard.
I welcome the attention they are currently paying to teacher education – it provides an opportunity for an informed debate about what we want teacher education to deliver in Australia.
22 | April 2013
Recognising graduate clinical teacher education Teaching in the 21st century will be profoundly impacted by universal access to information, advances in neuroscience that help us better understand learning processes and the development of assessment tools which guide teaching interventions.
Contemporary teaching needs to be much more than information transmission. Teachers need to respond to these developments and integrate them into their practise, working collaboratively to solve problems and share the latest advances in practice.
More than ever, teachers’ role is to deliberately intervene to ensure every student achieves or exceeds their learning potential – as my colleague professor John Hattie puts it,“ every student should achieve at least a year’ s growth in return for a year’ s input”.
I believe this ability to meet individual student learning needs requires an evidence-based interventionist teaching practice; at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education we call this practice clinical teaching.
Clinical teaching is intellectually challenging, requiring high levels of analytic thinking and judgement. As such, it requires study at the masters level – as already occurs in some nations with top performing education systems. This is why, in time, I believe all teachers should complete clinical graduate study before qualifying. However, this is a long-term vision; in the meantime, we need a way forward that includes both undergraduate and graduate programs.
Just as we require high standards for entry into other professional degrees like medicine, law and psychology, we should require equally high standards for entry into teacher education. Therefore, some rationalisation of the numbers of schoolleavers studying teaching is needed at the undergraduate level, particularly in areas of over-supply.
At the same time, we need to start building the numbers of clinical teachers in our system, and formally recognising their expertise.
A good starting point is the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership( AITSL) national program standards, which currently offer little differentiation between undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses in terms of graduate outcomes.
A more demanding set of standards based on the attributes of clinical teachers should be applied to all graduate teacher education courses, and institutions should be supported to meet these standards.
So, what is clinical teaching? Clinical teachers are interventionist practitioners who:
• monitor and evaluate their impact on learning and adapt the lesson to meet