Professionalizing Teacher Education

Performance Assessment, Standards, Moderation, and Evidence

Claire Wyatt-Smith, Lenore Adie, Michele Haynes, Chantelle Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367332136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000592122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher quality and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobilized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher preparation and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education.

The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal.

This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure.

The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes presented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.

Part 1 Conceptualization, design, and implementation

1 Standards, large-scale evidence, professional judgment, and the affordances of digital technologies in teacher education

DOI: 10.4324/9780429318504-2

Teacher education and issues of evidence and quality

This book tells the story of a reform initiative in initial teacher education (ITE) aiming to prepare ‘classroom ready teachers’: What the introduction of a teaching performance assessment (TPA) actually looks like and how it stimulates culture change. The book takes up three questions. How did change occur? How much progress has occurred in reforming ITE using TPAs in the last five years? What more needs to be done to install an agreed standard for graduate teachers on entering the profession?

Currently, societies are being formed and reformed within a crucible of change triggered by geo-political and socio-economic conditions, new and emerging technologies, climate-related changes, and global pandemics. The recurring message across the global community is that we are living in unprecedented times. This has intensified calls for thinking differently about the purposes and practices of education and schooling systems: How can we educate for an informed citizenry, high levels of literacy and numeracy, and radically different workplaces where the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and communicative competences that had currency in preceding industrial eras are no longer relevant or sufficient? Schwab (2017) identified four stages of industrial change ranging from steam, science, digital technologies, and now into the era of increasing computer power and data including the use of cloud and mobile technologies, and artificial intelligence.

In this broad context, teacher education and assessment have been recognized as fields for much-needed reform. This reflects how assessment evidence, including test data, has been highly valued for its function in reporting student achievement. However, it has been underutilized to investigate how student learning occurs in real time and how progression occurs over time. This is the case even though the assessment for learning movement has been recognized for some time as influential in several countries including the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (Broadfoot & Black, 2004). Here, we reflect how the traditionally recognized purposes of assessment – formative (improvement), summative (measurement) – have tended to operate on separate fronts. We also observe how school assessment practices have been resistant to change since the introduction of mass schooling, though COVID-19 has challenged some of the long-standing assumptions about ‘good’ assessment practices (Broadfoot, 2007; Lingard et al., 2021).

Calls for reforming teacher education have been growing in many countries with the print media capturing public dissatisfaction with the quality of graduates entering the teaching profession. This has occurred at a time of intensifying attention given to the results of international tests that are used to serve government interest in gauging the quality of schooling systems. UNICEF’s joint statement on World Teacher’s Day emphasized the criticality for ensuring quality teachers and quality teacher education as a basic right of all children to secure a better future (Targeted News Service, 2018). Globally, concerns with teacher quality and efforts to improve teacher quality are evident. For example, the introduction of teacher professional standards in South Africa aimed to improve teacher quality and professionalism, with ITE reported as one factor contributing to the poor quality of teachers (Businge, 2019; Robinson, 2019). This resulted in major changes for teacher education in the country (Wanzala, 2019). In New Zealand, there has been media commentary that teacher education was failing to produce quality teachers (e.g., Collins, 2017) with some identifying systemic weaknesses in teacher preparation (e.g., Jones, 2017; Moir, 2017; The Southland Times, 2017). Similarly, in Canada, teacher education has been reported as needing improvement (Waugh, 2020). In the UK, concern with the quality of new teachers (Denholm, 2017; Wightwick, 2017) has also been raised in the media. For example, attention in Scotland has focused on poor literacy and numeracy skills of trainee teachers (Grant, 2017), the apparent lack of training that student teachers receive in teaching literacy and numeracy (e.g., Johnson, 2017), and a wider call for radically rethinking teacher education (Drew, 2018). Added to these concerns is the pressing issue of teacher shortages as well as decreasing numbers of candidates choosing to study teacher education evident in the literature and the media (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2020; García & Weiss, 2019; Henebery, 2020; See & Gorard, 2020; UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016; Wiggan et al., 2020). This issue is one of the reported triggers for the 2021 review of teacher education in Australia, discussed later in this chapter.

Australian media reports (e.g., Clark, 2017; O’Flaherty, 2020) have sustained the theme of reforming teacher education. For example, O’Flaherty’s 2020 report titled “Low OP¹ hurdle dumbing down future teachers” referred to the low academic results required for entry to a teacher education program, and so highlighted a lack of ‘quality’ candidates in teacher education. This refrain is similarly evident in a previous commentary in the Australian media by the then Federal education minister, Christopher Pyne (2014; Figure 1.1). In this figure, the segments show the reported direct association between falling education performance in the country and “the quality of our teaching and quality of our teachers”, described as “one of the important, if not most important, determinants affecting education performance” (para. 4 in source article). The concerning claim that “one-quarter of Australian year 4 students do not meet the minimum standard of reading proficiency” in PISA (para. 3 in source article), is further strengthened by the statement that Australia’s “brightest 30–40 percent of students are falling behind the best in the rest of the world”. These performance observations lead to the summary conclusion that teacher education in Australia is “not up to scratch” (para. 7 in source article) and further, that teacher education programs are not attracting the top students as they once did. The connection between performance outcomes and quality is made compelling through the claim of increased spending in education and reduced classroom numbers.

Figure 1.1 Selected extracts from The Sydney Morning Herald, Federal Politics (February 18, 2014): Christopher Pyne’s comments on quality education and best teachers

Fast track to 2021, media coverage of teacher education continues to circle around issues of claimed “poor-quality teaching and testing” (see Figure 1.2, The New Daily headline) and the push to “get students back on the top of the OECD rankings” (see Figure 1.2, Financial Review). Against the background that we have sketched to this point, the Australian public was well prepared for the announcement of a further review into teacher preparation, called by the current Federal education minister, Alan Tudge (2021). This review will extend to “how to attract the best and brightest into teaching” (see Figure 1.2, Financial Review) and address the reported overemphasis on theory at the expense of practice and attention to evidence-based teaching methods. Goss et al. (2019) had similarly identified that a way to improve “the quality of the future teaching workforce is to encourage many more high achievers to apply” (p. 8) with workforce planning identified as necessary to address workforce shortages (Patty, 2021).

Figure 1.2 Collage of 2021 headlines from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Financial Review, and The New Daily related to teacher quality in Australian media

Tudge characterized the review as leading to “The next evolution of reforms … to build from the TEMAG [Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group] reforms” (para. 71). In his recent speech, he indicated that “This review will investigate where there is still further work to do to ensure that all ITE courses are high-quality and adequately prepare our teachers to be effective from day one” (para. 71). Here, the continuing focus on preparing classroom ready teachers, that came to the fore in the TEMAG reforms, is expected to continue. However, the new refrain is the reference to reforms needed for “arresting declining academic results” (see Figure 1.2, The Age) with Tudge identifying three areas of reform: “quality teaching, particularly initial teacher education, curriculum and assessment” (Tudge, 2021, para. 51).

The value of ‘quality’ teachers and ‘quality’ teaching is widely advocated as essential for student learning and achievement. Yet the term ‘quality’ itself is opaque and open to a variety of interpretations. However, if we look across professions, quality and quality performance have some demonstrated characteristics or recognizable features. In medicine, for example, patients discuss looking for the ‘best’ doctor, referring to aspects such as the effectiveness of treatment and bedside manner; in golf, quality performance is indicated by technical features including golf swing, choice of clubs, difficulty of the course, and the final score card. Irrespective of the field, demonstration of quality performance appears to be bound up with expertise – expert ways of doing, being, thinking, and interacting. Expert performance appears to entail not only recognizable knowledge and skills, but also values and dispositions. The development of expertise or ‘quality’ performance is recognized as a progression from novice to expert in which performance becomes intuitive rather than the rigid following of rules or steps (Adie et al., 2020). Throughout this book, we return to ‘quality’ as a central motif. We aim to explore with readers what evidence of ‘quality’ looks like in the teaching profession, through theory, research, and practice lenses.

In addition to the main questions introduced earlier, the book considers: What do we know about the quality of beginning teachers’ preparedness for practice at the point of entry to the profession? What can we say about the expected professionalism of these teachers? Currently, data on beginning teachers’ preparedness tend to be limited to small-scale studies, typically reliant on qualitative analysis of perceptions and self-reports. To date, scant attention has been given to sustained longitudinal research of actual practice and performance evidence. In Australia, Green et al. (2018) noted that “investigations into the elements of teacher preparation programs that effectively prepare graduate teachers for the realities of the teaching profession are lacking” (p. 104). The authors characterized research into program effectiveness as “invaluable for practitioners and policy makers, particularly in light of the ‘reality shock’ often encountered by beginning teachers due to a disparity between their tertiary experiences and the classroom realities, contributing to a high early career attrition rate” (p. 105). In New Zealand, a discussion paper into the future options for ITE (Ed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• PART 1 Conceptualization, design, and implementation
• PART 2 Data analytics, systems thinking, and digital architecture
• Glossary
• Index