Search

Clinical reflection with a focus on student impact is now a mandated attribute for graduate teachers across Australia via the capstone teacher performance assessment task. This policy move is forcing teacher educators to examine their programs to find space for activities that help pre-service teachers to develop the skills and dispositions required for the teacher performance assessment. Some of the best opportunities for clinical reflection occur after pre-service teachers teach lessons during their professional experience in schools. The data for this study were generated during the trial of a lesson feedback and reflection form for pre-service teachers in NSW, Australia. This study examined 13 pre-service teachers' responses in 134 lesson feedback and reflection forms. A phenomenographic analysis was conducted on the responses to produce an inclusive and hierarchical four-level taxonomy of clinical reflection. These data showed that although all levels of the taxonomy were present in post lesson feedback and reflection forms, clinical reflection was less frequent than other categories of reflective practice such as causal. These findings have clear implications for the precision of the learning protocols deployed in professional experience experiences in teacher education for the purpose of fostering clinical reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has continued to effect higher education globally in significant ways. During 2020, many institutions shifted learning online overnight as the sector closed its doors and opened new sites for remote teaching. This article reports on an international study [Phillips et al., 2021] that sought to capture how cross-sectoral teachers experienced these emergency changes during the first months of restrictions. The data, analysed using narrative identity theory, revealed concerns that fall into two broad categories: technologies and relationships. Significantly, it was not a loss of content delivery or changes to assessment that prompted the greatest anxiety for our colleagues, but that they held significant concerns about their students' mental health; inequities of access to a range of services including technological; and challenges connecting emotionally with their students at a distance. The results provide actionable strategies for higher education institutions to apply in future emergencies where remote teaching is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Evidence-based practice, in a form which draws predominantly on quantitative research and privileges randomised controlled trials as research methods, has been translated from medicine into education. It follows that combining understanding of both disciplines may contribute to insights into the costs and benefits of this project. This article shares findings from a small study initiated by a medical doctor and teacher educator to compare versions of practice and professionalism offered by two texts from our respective disciplines. These texts advocate evidence-based practice for patients and students with disability and/or special needs. We describe our methodology and methods for interdisciplinary comparative textual analysis and share how this comparison contributes to understanding ways evidence-based practice is performed in education. In particular, we compare the versions of professionalism imagined in these cases and ask questions for policy and practice about motivations for the choices made in the apparently neutral process of "translation". [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]

Globally, technology is now a vital element of the school curriculum. Technology has changed the way children learn, and when teachers integrate technology into pedagogical practices, resources, and assessment it expands the way teachers teach. This paper explores how initial teacher education (ITE) programs across Australia position the Technologies Curriculum. It uses data provided at a symposium of teacher educators who deliver ITE in the use of technologies. The paper maps data from 32 universities, including primary, secondary, undergraduate and postgraduate programs. It also investigates the naming conventions of courses in these programs and exemplifies the student experience by providing three vignettes from three programs in three different states. The findings suggest that Technologies education in Australia is offered in many ways to pre-service teachers, thus the landscape of this teaching area is diverse. This paper contributes to the field in being the first research to explore how Australian universities teach Technologies within their ITE programs. It offers a snapshot of how technologies are positioned in Australian ITE programs. [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]

For teacher educators, one challenge is how to prepare pre-service teachers to engage more deeply with students in high-poverty communities, some of whom they will ultimately teach. Addressing community engagement requires an institutionally embedded strategy to involve Indigenous, refugee, poor, and other historically vulnerable communities in central, rather than tokenistic, ways. This paper reports on the first conceptual stages of a framework for an Australian community-engaged pathway into teaching based on research into how teachers can work for and alongside under-represented families from high-poverty communities. [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]

Recent reforms in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Australia have called for primary pre-service teachers to graduate with a specialisation in a priority learning area. This represents a significant change to the way that primary teachers are prepared. In this paper, we use Carol Bacchi's What's the Problem Represented to be? approach (WPR) to analyse the discourses present in four policy documents that have led to the introduction of primary specialisations in Australian education. The policy analysis reveals that the introduction of primary specialisations does not have a strong evidence base. Moreover, slippage in definitions causes confusion about what the role entails, with certain people marginalised by this policy direction. Recommendations are given for how teachers and teacher educators can work effectively within this new policy context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher educators continue to debate the most effective strategies to assist teachers to become confident educators of Aboriginal students, and Aboriginal content and perspectives. Recently, pre-service teachers have begun to be taught cultural responsiveness with varying degrees of success. The paper is created from (1) data gathered from ethnographic research; (2) the existing literature; (3) my lived experience of being an Aboriginal teacher educator; and (4) my own experiences with racism and oppression. The therapy narrative technique of externalising conversations is used in this paper to facilitate a conversation with the identified problem of racism. The resulting script is a dialogue between an Aboriginal teacher educator and the Master Storyteller Racism, with the 'audience' consisting of pre-service teachers. The paper seeks to bring together, in one location, a number of socio-cultural and socio-historical events and narratives regarding Aboriginal peoples and their cultures. It is argued that if the many guises of racism that continue to perpetuate a system that works towards under-educating Aboriginal students are not revealed and disrupted, then a counterstory of Aboriginal education success will remain silent. [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]

In a contemporary era where accountability and evidenced-based practice is critical, teacher educators must look for a balanced approach to providing informative research outcomes to influence policy and practice. Mixed methods is suggested as a way to do this. An examination of 1055 empirical research articles published in two prominent teacher education journals (2010–2016) was conducted. Results showed 46.5% of the studies used qualitative methods, 27.9% used quantitative methods, and 25.6% used mixed methods. Within the proportion of mixed methods studies, it was identified that a balanced qualitative and quantitative approach (71.1%) appeared to be most prevalent. Of these, 68.5% were considered Concurrent Parallel in nature. The trend over time suggests a decline in the percentage of qualitative-only studies and an increase in mixed methods studies. This trend implies that teacher education researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the flexibility offered by mixed methods research and how it can be used to investigate complex issues within the field. This paper offers another angle to the existing discourse on the need for diversity in education studies to engage with policy and practice, from a methodological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been more than 100 reports focusing on the effectiveness of teacher education in Australia over the last 35 years with many positioning teacher education as flawed and in need of reform. These frequent criticisms have drawn attention to the difficulty teacher educators can experience when trying to interrupt or contest this representation: a situation not unique to Australia. In the United States, for example, Pam Grossman has suggested that those in teacher education 'seem ill prepared to respond to critics who question the value of professional education for teachers with evidence of our effectiveness' (Grossman in J Teach Educ 59(1):10-23, ). A key question facing teacher educators, therefore, concerns the kinds of research that will most effectively allow us to lead debates about teacher preparation. This paper outlines an approach to the conceptualization and conduct of research into the effectiveness of teacher education that seeks to move debates in new directions. Drawing upon the theoretical resources of Soja (Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, ) and Lefebre (The production of space, ) we outline the ways in which a spatial approach to conceptualizing teacher education influenced the design and conduct of a large scale, longitudinal project that investigated the question of the effectiveness of teacher education in Australia. In exploring the design features of this ARC linkage grant the paper demonstrates how research changes when teacher education is conceptualised from a spatial point of view and illustrates the ways in which consideration of the conceived, perceived and lived spaces of teacher education can move research about effectiveness into new directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we challenge the current focus on 'best practice', graduate teacher tests, and student test scores as the panacea for ensuring teaching quality and argue for ways of thinking about evidence of quality beginning teaching outside and beyond the current neoliberal accountability discourses circulating in Australia and other countries. We suggest that teacher educators need to reinsert themselves as key players in the debates around quality beginning teaching, rather than being viewed as a source of the problem. To enable teacher educators to assume accountability for quality beginning teachers, we propose the framework of a capstone teacher performance assessment-a structured portfolio called the Authentic Teacher Assessment (ATA)-and examine examples of these assessments through the lens of critical discourse analysis. As a measure of 'readiness to teach', the ATA is compared with supervising teachers' assessments of preservice teachers. We argue that structured portfolios that include artefacts derived from preservice teachers' practice in classrooms along with graduate teacher self assessments provide a stronger accountability measure of effective beginning teaching and demonstrably address the current anxiety regarding 'evidence'. We suggest that such an approach should be reliable enough to be 'read' by external assessors (and moderated across other teacher education institutions). Rigorous research on a national basis is called for in order to develop and implement a structured portfolio as rich evidence of graduates' quality and readiness to teach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of teacher educators' emotion display when teaching and interacting with students. Little is known about this phenomenon in higher education generally, and teacher education specifically. An empirical study was conducted to address this gap by investigating teacher educators' views on appropriate and inappropriate emotion display and its functions in the process of teaching. The study also examined how teachers used emotion regulation strategies to manage the intensity of their experienced emotions. The participants (six male, nine female) were from two public Australian universities and were all teaching first-year students in pre-service education. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Qualitative analyses revealed that these teachers viewed the open expression of positive emotions as an integral aspect of their teaching practice. In terms of negative emotions, they reported the criticality of controlling such experiences, and the occasional need to completely conceal them. Some reflected on the instrumental functions and conscious use of emotion display and emotion suppression. Findings are discussed in light of prior research; limitations of this exploratory study are addressed, and directions for future research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]