Nice plan to toughen teacher degree

No matter the question in education, the answer more often than not is better teacher education. Unfortunately, the quality of teacher education seems to be an intractable problem for Australian schools.

The federal government’s appointment of John Hattie and John Fleming as the new chairman and deputy chairman of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership — an organisation many teachers and principals had never heard of — was a strong signal that AITSL’s focus and profile were about to change. This did not take long.

Last week, Hattie indicated things were going to change in teacher education under his watch. He talked of “tougher”, “harder”, “standards”, “outcomes” and “impacts”. This is a harbinger of his approach, grounded in the requirement for evidence that reforms are working.

Several interconnected factors have contributed to the problems with teacher education. Entry standards are low compared with other degrees, and this has several flow-on effects. The intellectual calibre of people who enrol in a degree inevitably influences the rigour and demands of the courses; and this creates an imbalance in the labour market that has led to a glut of qualified primary teachers. It also places an enormous strain on chools and universities to accommodate practical placements for large numbers of trainee teachers.

There are two ways to address the low quality of teacher education and oversupply of some teachers. One is to restrict entry to teaching degrees to highly capable students. To most people, this is an obvious place to start. At the recent Australian Primary Principals Association conference, ABC journalist Emma Alberici put to a panel of speakers (including me) the proposition that some people enrol in teaching degrees because they can’t get into any other course. Five of the six panellists supported higher entry levels for teaching degrees. Tellingly, the lone dissenting vote was that of the president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education.

The other strategy to improve the quality of new teachers is to make the degree harder and elevate the standards required for graduation. Hattie would like the accreditation and evaluation standards for teaching degrees to be much tougher. If this results in some courses being scrapped because they don’t meet the standard for the academic rigour of courses or for graduate teachers’ impact on students, then so be it.

There’s a lot to like about this approach. One does not have to dig very deep to find examples of where teacher education might have its priorities off-kilter. The University of Wollongong offers courses in Supporting Children to be Environmental Change Agents and Gender and Social Justice in its primary teaching degree.

Applicants for the masters of teaching (secondary) degree at the University of Newcastle have to submit a short “writing task” to the selection committee and are judged on just three criteria — the quality of their writing, their explanation of why they want to be a teacher, and “evidence of reflection on the key dimensions of contemporary schooling for an equitable society”. Any rational person would be completely flummoxed by how to respond to the last criterion. Aside from the fact that it reads as if it were produced by postmodern essay generator software, the larger question is why “an equitable society” is the highest priority for a postgraduate qualification in secondary teaching. Why not ask the candidate how their discipline of study will enrich the intellectual development of students? Or what they see as the key challenges for schools and students? While it is a worthy policy goal to minimise the impact of disadvantage, it is impossible to create a completely equitable society, and to expect teachers to do so is a fool’s errand.

It is not a particularly difficult exercise to establish what constitutes quality in the delivery of a teaching degree. What is not yet clear about Hattie’s plan is how to measure the impact of graduate teachers on students as a way of evaluating the quality of teaching degrees. These are the early days of Hattie’s chairmanship of what promises to be a much more demanding AITSL, but history suggests he’ll have his work cut out.

Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.