In light of recent media reports detailing the Independent Education Union’s fight for increased support for teachers supervising university students in the classroom, Federal Secretary Chris Watt highlights the importance of delivering a high quality initial teacher education program. Read the full piece below:
Delivering a High Quality Initial Teacher Education Program
A high quality teaching profession is integral to the achievement of high education
outcomes for Australia’s children and young people.
The Independent Education Union (IEU) believes that high quality teaching is underpinned
by an holistic and comprehensive set of elements. These key elements form the basis of the
IEU’s Framework for Quality Teaching.
The IEU framework is based on three critical foundations; enabling quality learning
environments, delivering quality career pathways and building quality teacher capacity.
Our desire to ensure that every child is able to reach their full potential through quality
teaching and learning means that all three foundations are essential and inextricably
interlinked.
The central principle of the framework is that the development and support of high quality
teaching is the responsibility not only of teachers individually and as a profession, but of
schools, systems and governments.
The current debate around ‘practicum placements’ brings into stark relief the failure of
governments and systems to address the weaknesses in current arrangements; weaknesses
that the IEU has been attempting to put on the ‘political’ and industrial agenda for over two
decades.
The pre-service training experience of teachers is critical to the ‘building quality teacher
capacity’ of the IEU framework.
Building quality teacher capacity requires comprehensive, systematic and sustained focus
and support for pre-service training.
Central and critical to this training is the student practicum (or pre-service placement).
A high quality initial teacher preparation, including high quality practicum experiences, is
critical to fostering and sustaining an appreciation of the teaching profession as being of
profound importance and value to society and one which is challenging and carries great
responsibility.
It is very important that there is a collaborative effort by governments, employing
authorities, schools and the teaching profession to properly resource and support the
various sets of relationships involved in the professional preparation of those seeking to be
teachers. To date there has been insufficient effort made to collaborate with the teaching
profession.
Schools and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must develop improved strategies to
ensure greater skill and confidence-building for students by making schools and HEI’s more
integrally related.
The IEUA notes that there are emerging and existing examples of “partnership” models
where schools and universities enter mutually reciprocal arrangements regarding the pre-
service placements. These include, for example, action research frameworks built into
course components allowing more direct input between schools and universities.
The IEU has supported such approaches when care is taken to ensure that schools receive
benefits from entering such partnerships, and that such partnerships become more
formalised and therefore more transparent regarding expectations and outcomes.
The coordination of links and the strengthening of support roles for pre-service teachers
teachers are important. Better links could be built if experienced practitioners (together
with other key stakeholders) were involved in a collaborative process with teacher educators
in the design and delivery of teacher education courses. Greater involvement of teacher
educators in school-based projects would strengthen links and break down the barriers
between theory and practice.
The industrial implications of such collaborative models require collaboration and
negotiation between employers, personnel in training institutes, teaching professionals at
the school level and unions in order to define the roles and responsibilities of the parties and
to negotiate and resolve the payment issues.
The importance of a well-resourced pre-service placement and well-resourced, well-
structured induction for new teachers to be able to develop confidence and a repertoire
of skills/strategies in student management cannot be understated. This will result in more
effective management of classrooms and improve the opportunity for quality teaching and
learning in all classrooms.
No pre-service course can equip teachers for the full range of schooling circumstances they
will encounter. This confirms the importance of the notion of a continuum of learning from
pre-service through induction to skilled practitioner.
A critical problem concerning the pre-service placement is the inadequacy and tenuousness
of appropriate funding from government, HEI’s and school authorities.
The IEU strongly supports the payment of teachers with responsibility for the supervision
and coordination of the practicum in its current form. Further, placement supervisors need
to be inserviced and supported in their role. These arrangements need to be the subject of
negotiations between the HEIs, employing authorities and the education unions and part of
an updated formal industrial agreement.
However, there is genuine scope and opportunity for re-casting the current pre-service
school practicum arrangements to provide more meaningful opportunities for the pre-
service teacher, to blend better with the way adults learn, to better support the work of
schools and to better utilize the experience and capacity of supervising teachers.
To do so however will require a genuine commitment of resources, resources that
are currently inadequate of the task of preparing students to take on one of the great
professions.
Chris Watt
Federal Secretary IEU