One of Julia Gillard’s lines about Tony Abbott’s cuts is that the Opposition, if elected, would abolish the Teach Next and Teach for Australia programmes. Yet, whether these two interlinked initiatives are in fact a good thing has not been widely canvassed – they’ve been presented as if they’re obviously and unquestionably that. A lot of us in the education game, though, think that there’s a lot more to being an educator than can be conveyed in eight weeks’ training.
My friend and ACU colleague Rachael Jacobs makes just that point in an op/ed published in the Fairfax papers. You can read it here.
Honestly, education warblings – I won’t give them the dignity of policies – like this are the equivalent of using some savlon and a band-aid on an arterial wound. Except you found the band-aid on the floor of a public toilet.
The plan isn’t fantastic and there are problems with it, however, Jacobs includes situations that whitewash the real issues (even if other things are about real issues.
One key issue with her argument is the comments that secondary school teachers often teach outside of their field.
The teachers teaching outside their field are teaching in the Mathematics/Science fields. Currently, the trend is English/History teachers teaching Maths/Science with zero background in those fields. As result of this Teach …. programs, you will have someone with a background in Maths/Science but only had eight weeks learning how to ‘deliver’ that information to students.
I’ve seen this first hand during my own experiences in school as well as friends in the profession. An acquaintance from HS is a qualified PE teacher, however, she has taken Grade 7/8 French classes even though her own limited background is taking French as an elective up until Year 10.
The same argument has been had and it happened at my own university when my intake was the first year where wecould not be admitted to a double degree of BA/BEd. The university decided to remove that option and it was decided that you could complete a Bachelors in your chosen interest and as long as it meant the requirements of the Institute of Teachers or whatever they changed their name to, you could be admitted into a Master of Teaching (which is basically a Grad Diploma of Teaching).
So do you think one situation is much worse than the other?
And will the teachers teaching outside their field pick up the subject matter faster than someone who doesn’t know much about teaching pick up teaching (with help obviously)?
To me what’s happened is a transgression on the difference between teachers and teachers aids and what actually constitutes a teacher aid. Parallels with public nursing?
There is also a whiff of ideological deinstitutionalisation about it, which would gut the system of those best capable and qualified to overview and implement education: educators.
You don’t have to think too far as to where the push has originated from.
Once again, bad and worse.
It looks like the next politicized program in the education debate, where TFA will be good if you vote Labor and bad if you vote Liberal. Too bad the results from these programs are mixed, but I doubt that’s what people are going to care about.
I was trying to point out that it is a value judgment either way. There is a shortage of teachers in specific fields, hence the reasons it is being directed to “accountants, bankers, engineers and scientists”. I don’t have statistics etc but I would infer that apart from possibly schools in Whoop Whoop, I don’t there is a shortage of English teachers.
As for my personal opinion, I think I would prefer my child to be taught by a person in the field with a limited pedagogical background as opposed to a person with a pedagogical background but having no ideas about something in the field. I guess it is what someone views as more important – a value judgment. A “layman” (trying to distinguish between the two) may know the information in a field (biology) but only have eight weeks of training how to deliver that information compared to a “teacher” who may have the training to deliver the information (and solutions to dealing with classroom situations etc) but does not know the information. I am concerned about qualified teachers teaching outside their field is the misinformation the students may receive because the teacher doesn’t know or understand it themselves (sure a teacher doesn’t have to know everything in their field but what about questions asked by a student that may not directly be on the syllabus for that semester when the PE teacher has to teach that French class or that English teacher teaching the Biology class.
Disclaimer: I refer to my possible future/imaginary child. I am not a trained school teacher even though I have had to take “education/pedagogy” courses because I have a teaching background, although not in formal classrooms.
Apologies for the missing words and grammar errors (almost midnight here). After all my bloody stresses in the last week trying to obtain my voting papers, I need to rest for a week!
Jacobs’ beef is that underqualified teachers will get to teach. That then becomes a question of what is the right qualification.
This is a matter of debate. But it’s a good thing for her that the Australian Catholic University doesn’t require lecturers to have PhDs, or she would be doing something else for a living.
Pot, meet kettle.
No Sara, it was a good neat post which exactly developed the idea behind the post and aspects and questions raised.
Unfair Sam.
A PhD is not a core requirement of being a university teacher. Many in vocational faculties don’t have one. Jacobs would need to be a registered teacher to lecture in education and would undoubtedly have a postgrad degree.
Personally, the idea of sending “Teach Next” kids with eight weeks training into the worst classrooms makes about as much sense as WWII Britain drafting mathematicians into the armed forces, and putting them in the SOE, instead of sending them to Bletchley Park.
Use them to pass their specialized domain knowledge to already engaged students in advanced classes, not cajole hostile year 8′s into learning how to read.
There is an election on. We are talking as if policy meant something. If burning schools was popular in Western Sydney Tony and Julia would posing for the cameras, smiling and handing tins of petrol to the mob.
This program might attract some good people, and who would begrudge that? After all, JG was happy to replace teaching staff with untrained scabs. Insisting on some semblance of training is a step in the right direction for her.
On the other hand, the old saying that teachers are born and not made has, sadly, a kernel of truth. The most important qualities that school teachers can have are to do with character, not training or or subject knowledge. I’d place experience next, with rat cunning a close third. Training I’d only value so far as it provides experience with a measure of advice and reflection. Subject knowledge helps, but I’ve seen very effective teachers with quite poor subject knowledge. If you think education is about kids learning academic stuff then you’re pretty optimistic.
If anybody really cared about policy they’d be better off looking at why teaching attracts so few of the best and brightest, and why the system burns through staff so fast. Not that I’d want to disparage young teachers, who are often wonderful, and sometimes even go on to have careers.
Thankfully, the Feds have very little to do with schools, and the election will be soon over.
@8, Sam, time was you could get a Senior Lecturer post armed with nothing much more than an Honours degree. Now you’d need to be post-doc with a publication record to get a post. Yet do you really believe (and would any practicing lecturer today in all honesty and modesty assert) that the quality and competence of higher education lecturers today is orders of magnitude beyond that of generations past? Hardly.
Apart from offering you an opportunity to level a cheap shot at Rachael Jacobs, what does all this have to do with people being put in front of classrooms of teenagers, after as little as 8 weeks training? Your cheap jibe about the difference between a postgrad and postdoc lecturer is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison with 8 weeks of Teach-For-{Country Name} and having done a full undergrad or postgrad course in the subject matter and extensive training in the pedagogical delivery thereof, innit?
Kim @ 10 – is there any requirement for uni lecturers to have a teaching qualification now? There wasn’t when I went through and whilst some lecturers were great, others were quite hopeless in spite of what I’m sure they’re great knowledge of the subject.
There are no requirements whatsoever that people teaching in universities have teaching qualifications. The demand for PhD is an odd one, since very few people do a PhD directly related to their areas of undergraduate teaching, and it has more to do with the research aspirations of universities – particularly growing their PhD enrolments – than with any discernable impact on teaching quality. Most university tutoring is done by people with no formal teacher training.
This therefore points to an oddity. One the one hand, it is being said on this blog and elsewhere that no-one could effectively teach in a school without an accredited university qualification. On the other hand, the vast bulk of teaching in universities is undertaken by people with no training in teaching whatsover.
What gives?
Jacobs says “While there is a follow-up apprenticeship-style training scheme, the initial learning takes place in front of real classrooms with live children, complete with all of the complexities of the modern classroom. “
With most preservice teachers saying that they learn more while on prac than in lectures, I don’t see how learning on the job is much different to what currently happens.
She then says “ they’ll have no knowledge of how to teach students with learning disabilities, how to modify work for students with special needs, how to deal with situations of domestic violence in their students’ lives, deal with drug and alcohol related issues, coach a sports team, break up a fight on playground duty or how to manage the behaviour of up to 30 adolescents at once.”
I would doubt that many of these issues are currently even superficially dealt with in Uni courses, so again, how will this be any different to what currently happens?
She says “there’s also no logic to putting the country’s most difficult classrooms in the hands of the most inexperienced teachers.”
I agree, but again, that is the current situation.
She says “Those who do choose to “graduate” from the program present a slap in the face to those who spent four years developing their teaching skills through a traditional pathway.”
This supposes that all teaching graduates complete a four year Bachelor of Education and ignores the fact that a large percentage of teachers complete a degree and then a one year Diploma of Education or Teaching. Those graduates have one year of training and most of their learning occurs on prac.
I’m not arguing that Teach for Australia is a great model but to argue it is inferior in outcomes to what currently happens, could seem self-serving.
Terry, you’d hope that university students would take some responsibility for their own learning.
As a lecturer, I don’t think I’m really “teaching” much at all; in large part, my job is convincing students it’s worth their while learning the material on the syllabus.
Terry – I think there used to be an argument that uni students were adult learners and thus tertiary teachers didn’t need to be qualified as such. I think that’s wrong and I think tutors should also get formal training.
Having said that when I enrolled in the Qut grad cert in tertiary teaching I found the content lacking and the pedagogy awfully management faddish.
About a decade ago though.
Some ed faculties do now only employ registered teachers just as psych or social work lecturers need professional accreditation.
By the way I think this topic is a bit of a derail – no thanks to Sam for that.
Rachael is doing a PhD fwiw.
In the NSW there is a short course which people-from-industry undertake before they begin teaching in TAFE. I took a cut-down version of it that just covered how adults learn and how to program a class (TAFE librarians teach information literacy and we felt ill-equipped for the teaching bit). It was very helpful.
However, tertiary students are self-motivated adults. I don’t think short courses could provide enough resources for dealing with the more varied population of schools, and I doubt they could provide enough information on the intellectual development of children. The time is just too short.
I’d be intrigued about the uptake of this thought-bubble: the people I know who have gone into teaching after a previous career have all been happy to do a degree/Grad Dip, because they haven’t been desperate for money and they want to be thoroughly prepared for a demanding profession. Who’s going to be choosing the short course? “Accountants, bankers, engineers and scientists” who are about to declare bankruptcy?
Interesting comparison to the university.
I think it depends on the type of university as well. I currently work overseas at a university. My position is in a department at the complete opposite end of what my studies are/were – they are Maths nerds and I’m of a Humanities/Cultural Studies/Linguistics/Sociology student. We are about to begin advertising for two tenure track positions and we are incredibly research intensive. As in, every single faculty member, at the very least, has one research grant. You may be the best ever teacher but with minimal research – our department does not care (we may employ you as a sessional) Even the Chair of our dept was not wanting to ask for teaching statements because he thought it was, similar to what I think Mark indicated somewhat, fuddy duddy bullshit plus we will work out their delivery/teaching skills if we want to interview them.
The interesting thing about research intensive places is when you do get a faculty member who can explain it to a layman like me (when it comes to Maths stuff) and it actually makes sense.
As someone else mentioned, teaching is for certain people. I was taught in HS Careers Counselling that we will have 7 careers/jobs at some point in our life – for some people, teaching is one of the first of those seven. My partner is the opposite – he worked in lobbying, consultancy and government policy before he decided to get out and become a teacher.
The key problem with the policy is looking at getting people in but not studying why people get out and what we can do to create an environment where this is such (“build worker morale” for HR speak). Sure, it isn’t for some people but why do others get out. Similar to current debates/issues with tenure (prominent in the US tertiary market moreso) is similar to the situation in schools – why are the experienced teachers not in the “difficult” schools?
Bad teachers don’t last in difficult schools. It’s too hard. But it depends what you call “difficult”: one teacher told me she found the excessive demands of wealthy parents (and their bratty kids, who were never ever at fault) a lot harder to take than the *other* types of difficulties.
My friend at a “difficult” Western Sydney school in her first year out scored a class that was difficult to program for as well (cross-stage composite, some disabled and some disturbed kids), and said she would not have coped without the support of her teacher colleagues. She’s teaching a class of emotionally disturbed children this year (though I suspect that’s not the official term) and loves the work and her class. Let us just say that character + competence + support = great teaching.