policy & reform
the needs of each student – rather than expecting the student to keep up regardless of their circumstances
• use evidence about what each student knows and understands at the start of the teaching period to inform their teaching interventions
• target their assessment and teaching practices to maximise the information obtained and the chances of improving the impact of teaching on student learning
• construct appropriate teaching and learning environments for every student, whatever their developmental stage and current abilities
• evaluate the impact of their teaching, to inform next steps.
Teaching is much more than passionate information transmission and behaviour management – too often, universities prepare teachers to teach subjects rather than students. Instead, our approach is to prepare our graduates as clinical practitioners who can meet the individual learning needs of their students.
The structure of clinical teacher education course is also important, although not sufficient – shared thinking
between the school and the university is essential. We need to break the cycle of teachers mentoring pre-service teachers in the manner in which they were taught. This simply recycles practice, without incorporating new research or fresh perspectives.
In the Master of Teaching, our teacher candidates spend two days a week in schools, supported by a school-based teaching fellow and a university-based clinical specialist, in addition to their mentor teacher. In this way, their university and school learning is seamlessly linked.
Preparing graduate teachers as clinical practitioners has never been more urgent. Australia’ s performance in international rankings is slipping, and our most able students are falling behind the fastest. New research from my colleague professor Patrick Griffin has also found that the top 25 per cent of students in particular are not progressing as quickly as the bottom 25 per cent. We need teachers who can stretch our most able students and meet their individual needs, and we need them now.
Teacher selector Academic achievement is not the only measure universities should use to select
pre-service teachers.
We have been developing an additional tool to inform the selection of candidates into the Master of Teaching. This sophisticated online instrument will measure candidates’ aptitude for teaching, based on the qualities we know excellent teachers possess( literacy, numeracy, cognitive ability, personality) and build a solid evidence base for the identification of effective teachers.
Introducing this tool will further enhance our selection processes, so that we know we are admitting the teacher candidates with the highest potential to become great teachers. We hope to introduce it from 2014.
No more low standards We need to stop settling for‘ OK’ in education. We should have high expectation of all our students – I would like to see them all reach their highest levels of achievement. This means demanding high standards across our system, and teacher education is a good place to start. n
Professor Field Rickards is Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.
www. campusreview. com. au April 2013 | 23