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The complex nature of teaching draws teachers to read so as to satisfy their curiosities, problem-solve and innovate. However, teachers find it challenging to access and learn from educational research findings. Through our work as 'consultant coaches' in one Australian school over the duration of one school year, we co-constructed strategies to support teachers in translating insights from professional reading in their classrooms. This article reports on how regular coach meetings provided a forum for professional discourse about successes and struggles that contributed to the generation of four interconnected strategies that supported teachers in making connections between educational research and their problems of practice. While experimenting with more sophisticated research-informed pedagogies sometimes produced tensions in the form of student resistance, persistence led to eventual success and tended to affirm for the majority of teachers that reading is a worthwhile professional activity. This, in turn, motivated teachers to continue reading. That coaches grew in their ability to encourage teachers to read and experiment is testament to the effectiveness of the coach meetings for supporting and extending their work as teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an Aboriginal cultural mentoring project for non-Aboriginal teachers that positions Aboriginal people front and centre as cultural and educational experts. In so doing it sets out to contribute to work in Australia that challenges 'common' understandings about mentoring in educational contexts where the expert is usually a western-educated non-Aboriginal teacher. In this project, non-Aboriginal teachers are supported in implementing culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogies into their classroom through building relationships with Aboriginal mentors and students. Analysis of thirteen pre and post surveys, four mentee interviews and one mentee focus group, illuminated the emergence of collaborative cultural mentoring processes, where teachers developed trusting, reciprocal and respectful relationships with Aboriginal people. We argue that a systematic, well-supported Aboriginal cultural mentoring program can be used to create and convert new knowledge into practice, and that this can have a positive impact on teachers' understanding of teaching/learning processes thereby contributing to Aboriginal student engagement in their learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Securing the quality of Australian education is a key policy target, and teaching workforce development has long been identified as the means to that end. This case of personalised professional learning in a school through a series of interactions between teachers and university-employed teacher educators (as academic coaches) speaks to teachers' perceptions of being on the receiving end of such policy targets. Teachers' experiences of working with an external coach was transformative for some, valuable for most, but not suited to everybody. The analysis of teacher participant data revealed three paradoxes in the delicate matters of power, choice and agency associated with being coached by outsiders. We apply a Bourdieuan lens of 'symbolic power' to make sense of these inherent power relations, and anticipate such insights will be informative to teacher educators involved in developing teacher coaching programs in the future, both at system and school levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined Australian distance education teachers' perspectives about how they drew on technological tools to support their primary and secondary students' learning. Via two focus groups (n = 9, n = 7), teachers identified that technology greatly assisted them in relation to developing relationships with students and families, creating interactive lessons, differentiating learning, providing quality feedback, and connecting peers. However, they also reported experiencing ongoing challenges and constraints related to gaining technology expertise, overcoming technology faults, and coping with additional accountability. Data made it clear that teacher use of technology was driven by specific student needs and that teachers drew heavily on both core pedagogical knowledge and technological pedagogical content knowledge. Findings suggest the need for more distance education specific professional development to ensure that teachers have the knowledges needed to support diverse learners in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of 'good enough' teacher education is taken from the work of Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst who proposed the idea of 'the good enough mother' (Winnicott in The family and individual development, Tavistock, London, 1965) in response to popular views of the time that good mothers all shared certain selfless characteristics, with negative effects for all those who failed to meet this impossible ideal of perfect mothering. I will argue that education researchers and professionals are now in a position to go beyond 'the crisis in teacher education' (that has once again this year been beaten up into a frenzy with the ATAR whisk) and begin to claim space for a reconceptualised teacher education, based on practice theory, which can take us forward with renewed energy and passion to challenge an impossible ideal of perfect teaching. As researchers, we need to mobilise our intellectual resources to address our colleagues in the field—our discipline leaders, our university managers, Deans, Vice Chancellors and our systems-based colleagues—to produce some effective self-talk about the place, nature and role of teacher education in this country. I will argue for the idea of a 'good enough' teacher education, one that explicitly aims to produce what I call, perhaps provocatively, a 'Good Enough' teacher—someone who knows she can never be fully prepared for the schools of today; who knows she is not 'classroom-ready' when she starts her career; but who is well prepared for her struggle every day, in and through her practice, to know and meet the needs of her students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]