Succeeding on your School Experience Placement

Brian Mundy

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529743999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

This book is designed to help you through one of the most important aspects of your pre-service teacher education: your school experience placements. Highly practical and accessible, it gives guidance on what happens before, during and after placement, and provide you with strategies on how to deal with the issues that you will encounter in school, including classroom management, lesson planning and catering for individual differences.

Each chapter includes:

·Relevant AITSL standards that are being addressed

·Key terminology that you'll need to familiarise yourself with

·Essential questions that encourage discussion of teaching practice

·Frequently asked questions by pre-service teachers with potential responses

·Placement scenarios that offer valuable learning opportunities

The book is also supported by 30+ downloadable lesson plan and classroom-ready templates.

1 Introduction

Relevant AITSL standards for this chapter

• 6. Engage in professional learning
  • 6.1 Demonstrate an understanding of the role of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in identifying professional learning needs
  • 6.2 Understand the relevant and appropriate sources of professional learning for teachers.
  • 6.4 Demonstrate an understanding of the rationale for continued professional learning and the implications for improved student learning.

(Education Services Australia, 2011)

Key vocabulary and concepts

Placement practicum; Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE); Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL); graduate teaching standards; Australian Curriculum; Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA); Assessment for Graduating Teachers (AfGT); Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA).

Chapter overview

This introductory chapter will respond to the essential questions identified and also some of the frequently asked questions around placements. It will describe the role of placements and their importance and value for pre-service teachers. The chapter will also outline the range of different types and lengths of placements around Australia. Placements from a range of different courses will be described including more traditional university courses, on-site programs and more extended in-school programs such as Teach for Australia. A number of other important issues such as how to maximise the value of your placement program, connecting placement school experiences and university classes, and meeting the graduate placement standards for a pre-service teacher will also be introduced. Finally, there will be an introduction to the core theme of the book: surviving placement or thriving in placement. The core ideas of this chapter have been summarised in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Chapter 1 overview

In this book the term ‘placement’ is used to cover the time spent in schools by pre-service teachers. In other texts and contexts placements are sometimes called practicum, professional experience, teaching experience, supervised teaching experience, teaching practice, work integrated learning or field experience. See Le Cornu (2015) for further details on this.

Essential questions for this chapter:

• EQ 1 Why do we have placements?
• EQ 2 What types of placements occur around Australia?
• EQ 3 What is needed to graduate as a pre-service teacher?
• EQ 4 What are the AITSL standards?
• EQ 5 How does placement prepare you for your graduating assessments?
• EQ 6 How can you maximise your learning from placements?
• EQ 7 How can you thrive as well as survive on placement?

FAQ: Why do we have to come to university when I learn so much more on placement?

All teaching courses require some time at university or in a discussion based online learning environment. Most courses have a block of time at university before placement classes start or a number of online units that need to be completed before placements begin. These initial classes set up and prepare students for their placement experiences. Courses vary significantly in their patterns for placement but all have placement experiences. A common observation and question in praxis inquiry/placement focused classes once students have started their placements is “why do we have to come to university when I can learn so much more on placement?”

This is a very important question for university lecturers to respond to carefully. The heart of any praxis inquiry/placement related subject is to connect theory and practice, placement and university, observations and understanding. Making sense of what students are seeing is very important. Building their understanding of the complexities of schooling, teaching and learning are essential. Connecting the content of university classes to student placement experiences and the realities of the classroom is a priority. Students can be overwhelmed by what they are seeing and having to do, hence encouraging questioning, sharing and unpacking these experiences, providing support to anxious and doubting students and building understanding is critical.

The university classroom is one place to help maximise your placement learning. The opportunity to unpack your experiences with a sympathetic and empathic audience can be critical to building understanding. Not all placement experiences are positive and learning from these negative experiences is critical to developing coping, managing and eventually thriving strategies. The role of the university tutor/lecturer includes supporting the pre-service teacher, challenging their thinking and scaffolding their learning. This can hopefully build on the learning from the discussions occurring with the mentor/supervising teacher in the actual placement context.

On occasion this discussion with the university tutor occurs on site during placement visits and even more rarely in an on-site environment when the university classes are held at the placement school. Most commonly they occur back at the university in a praxis or placement centred subject. What is most important is that they occur and that this happens in a supportive manner to grow the professional understandings of the pre-service teacher.

EQ 1 Why do we have placements?

An initial teacher education (ITE) program is accredited by demonstrating evidence against the nationally agreed Accreditation Standards and Procedures. All Australian ITE programs are accredited by state and territory teacher regulatory authorities using these nationally agreed Standards and Procedures. (https://www.aitsl.edu.au/deliverite-programs/understand-ite-program-accreditation [2017, accessed May 18, 2020])

School based placements are an integral part of all teaching courses and programs. Each state has a teacher registration board that sets out the requirements for becoming a teacher. An important component of those requirements is the completion of a teacher education course that includes a minimum number of days on placement as well as a minimum number of lessons that need to be taught on these placements. These placement requirements may vary between states and territories but all expect some form of placement to show that the pre-service teacher has the necessary skills to teach and manage a classroom and this has been recognised by authentic experiences in one or more classrooms for a minimum number of days and lessons. This experience has to be recognised as having occurred at the necessary standard by an experienced mentor or mentors. These standards are the nationally identified AITSL standards that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

These placement days are the opportunity for pre-service teachers to show that they can teach and manage a class and meet the required standards. They provide the opportunity to connect theory taught and studied at university to real classrooms. Placement supports the growth of the practical skills that teachers need to complete their professional roles. These days also provide the opportunity to observe experienced mentor(s), trial ideas, experiment with different methods of teaching, try out strategies for managing a class and learn how to maximise learning for the diverse population of students that they will teach across their career.

FAQ: Can I find my own placement?

The answer to this question depends on the university course and its policies. For some distance based courses where students come from many different locations and are essentially studying from home, it may be policy for students to find their own placements in a geographically local school. In most courses however, there is a placement office/officer that is responsible for finding appropriate placements for students. We have found it best for the university to locate placements although students can make suggestions of potential sites where they may have an appropriate contact, relationship or reference. It is important for students not to cold call schools as if this occurs repeatedly it can make schools reluctant to take students. Indeed, universities often have long term relationships with particular schools and work hard to keep these relationships successful. Particular schools in specific geographic regions may also have relationships with individual universities and do not take students from other institutions. Alternatively, a school may have relationships and agreements with a couple of universities and then needs to balance the number and timing of student placements to meet the needs of the various institutions. All of this means that there is generally a preference for pre-service teachers to not find their own placements.

EQ 2 What types of placements occur around Australia?

Teaching placements vary enormously around Australia and across courses. Some, such as the Teach for Australia program, have a short program of study early in the year and follow this up with extended placements or internships at one school. Other courses have a range of programs across a number of years such that pre-service teachers experience a non-education setting, then a primary setting and a secondary setting. Postgraduate masters level programs tend to have one extended placement within an academic year or alternatively two separate experiences for two different school settings. Within the undergraduate P-12 program at my university, students experience both secondary and primary school placements with each year having a different focus.

Many placements consist of blocks of weeks across the academic year. Other programs have a blend of regular single days combined with a number of two, three, four or five week blocks depending upon the priorities of the university courses and a variety of practical constraints such as timetabling, the type of students and the nature of other university programs. This can become an issue when the one placement school receives pre-service teachers from a number of different institutions. This is particularly an issue when the placements overlap.

Placements start at a range of different times of the year with universities making decisions about this based on a range of factors such as the attitude of the schools involved, the structure and nature of their own programs, the enrolment times of pre-service teachers into their courses, the curriculum being taught, what other universities require, as well as the requirements of the various state teacher registration boards. Placements with some courses start in the first week of the school year whilst other courses have placements that start much later in the school year. Most placements are completed in the same academic year, but on occasions they may run across different years in order to meet the minimum standards and expectations of the registration boards. The teacher registration boards in each state also spell out the minimum number of placement days and lessons that must be completed in each year of every course for registration and accreditation purposes.

FAQ: What happens if I have a late placement?

This is not an unusual situation with many pre-service teachers starting their placements late due to factors such as:

• the numbers of students needing placements at that time
• pre-service teachers not correctly completing their student profiles or similar programs that give the required details for placement
• the difficulty of placing pre-service teachers with a specific specialist requirement such as psychology or a specific Language other than English (LOTE)
• distance
• health problems

Partnership officers will be working hard to find placements, however, pre-service teachers can support this by ensuring they have provided all the required details as early as possible, by identifying schools with whom they may already have contacts and letting the placement/partnerships office know about this and by not cold calling and creating future problems for the partnership office. As well as this, if they have a late placement the pre-service teacher can work on their preparation for the placement (see Chapter 2 for some more ideas on this). Classes at the university can also support this preparation. Discussions may be occurring in praxis inquiry/placement-based classes where there is a mix of pre-service teachers with placements and those that are not yet placed. In this situation it is valuable to employ whole class discussion and groups with a mix of different types of students with different situations. This supports the sharing of the experiences of those already in placement with those about to start. This allows those with delayed starts to learn from the experiences of their peers, to listen to their issues and to hear, consider and respond to their questions and dilemmas.

EQ 3 What is needed to graduate as a pre-service teacher?

Once again care needs to be taken to consider the individual requirements of teacher registration boards and universities as there may be some variation across the country. In general, teaching graduates need to meet the specific requirements of their courses. These courses have been accredited to provide teacher training and preparation. This should ensure that the graduating pre-service teachers meet the AITSL standards and are able to demonstrate and provide evidence of this competency. Registration also requires that pre-service teachers have passed the numeracy and literacy requirements needed to satisfactorily complete the LANTITE (Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education) that is another formal element. This test places pre-service teachers in the top 30% of the population.

A satisfactory completion of placement means meeting the requirements with regard t...