Australian Professional Standards for Teachers

This is how to reposition teachers as experts

20 years into a new century how do we understand educational expertise?

In Finland teachers are trusted professionals, who have a large degree of autonomy over pedagogy and assessment, are able to carry out research, and play a critical role in the design of curricula (Pollari, Salo & Koski, 2018). This does not appear to be the case in many other jurisdictions, including Australia. Indeed, increasingly “teachers and principals are cast as technicians who have the technical skills to implement the ideas of others but not the professional expertise to engage in the exciting task of theorizing and designing curriculum” (Reid, 2019, p. 44-45).

This has led to a growing call for teachers to become ‘research-engaged’ (Godfrey, 2016) and for teachers’ practice to be more research-informed (Kolber & Heggart, 2021). However, the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2011) do not expect teachers to ‘access and critique relevant research’ unless they wish to be recognised as ‘highly accomplished’ and do not expect them to engage in research until they become ‘lead teachers’. In contrast, the OECD (2021) argue that teachers need to be experts in learning, and this means that they need to be involved in research, because “the current knowledge base is not in the library; it is in the invisible college of informal associations among research[ers]’ (Locke et al., 2009, p. 48). Indeed, to be a mature profession you need to own (i.e. create) the knowledge base – you have to be research literate (Sachs, 2016, cited in Mills et al., 2021), which “means being both a discerning consumer and a discerning producer of research” (Mills et al., 2021, p. 81).

Beyond individual teachers, the turn to more research-informed practice is reflected in the proliferation of government-backed education research institutes devoted to influencing policy and practice, among them the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, the What Works Clearinghouse/ Institute of Education Sciences in the US, and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. These initiatives attempt to address the ‘theory-practice gap’ which the OECD (2021, Executive Summary) identified as a “major barrier to the use of scientific knowledge and research evidence” in education. However, these research clearing houses tend to adopt a ‘What works’ approach that de-professionalises teachers (Gore 2020, cited in Mills et al., 2021) by presenting them with guidance on ‘evidence informed practice’ that can marginalise context and individual teacher’s expertise. The Gonski 2.0 Report (Department of Education and Training, 2018) recommended creating a national evidence and research institute, which led to the formation of the Australian Research Education Organisation (AERO) in 2021, which aims to build more explicitly upon teachers’ expertise.

Similarly, a positive approach is evident in the Q Project at Monash University, which with $6.3million of funding from the Ramsay Foundation, is exploring teachers’ use of evidence. This at least positions teachers as engaging directly with research, rather than having it mediated by centralized research clearing houses. However, this still positions teachers as consumers of research, rather than as researchers. In today’s knowledge economy being seen as having expertise requires that you are contributing to the professional knowledge base, not just drawing upon it (Twining & Henry, 2014).

A quiet revolution

In the last decade, a growing number of schools have moved to embed ‘research-informed practice’ as a key part of their professional learning and improvement agendas. While research has long been happening in schools this has often been on the periphery, or something done ‘to’ schools rather than ‘by’ schools. Breaking this pattern, in the last few years more than 30 Australian schools have either established a ‘research centre’ or ‘institute’ of some description, or appointed a ‘research lead’, often reworking an existing senior leadership role to explicitly focus on research. They are raising the expectation for schools as not just passive consumers of expert knowledge produced elsewhere, but genuine contributors to the knowledge economy.

What we’re calling ‘Research Invested Schools’ embrace research and innovation as key to their identity and enterprise. They have clear research and innovation priorities, engage staff in inquiry programs from practitioner research through to PhDs, and are both conducting their own studies and translating research conducted elsewhere. Many Research Invested Schools emphasise practitioner research, where teachers design and implement small projects inquiring into their practice. For example, Pymble Ladies’ College supports research through its own ethics committee, which has membership across the school and academic community. Staff and student research is published through their ‘Illuminate’ and ‘Perspectives’ journals. Similarly, the Barker Institute at Barker College publishes a journal of staff academic writing, hosts public events, and conducts its own research. For example, it is conducting a longitudinal study following the journey of a cohort of students through 10 years at Barker.

Whilst Research Invested Schools can and do carry out research independently, they may also form partnerships with local universities or school networks, (such as the Association of Independent Schools of NSW’s School-Based Research Projects program). Some schools have acted as industry partners for major Australian Research Council linkage grants, such as studies of Indigenous education between The Scots College and the Australian Catholic University, and next-generation learning spaces between Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar School and the Learning Environments Applied Research Network at the University of Melbourne. Research Invested Schools are also very focused on research translation, especially parent and community education, sharing their learning through conferences, lectures, publications, podcasts, webinars and more. The Crowther Centre at Brighton Grammar School in Melbourne produces a podcast featuring leading thinkers on boys and boys’ education, which has over 60,000 followers.

By contributing to the development and utilisation of educational research, Research Invested Schools are helping to re-professionalise teaching and reinvigorate teachers as experts.

A group of schools hosted by The Scots College, Sydney, recently hosted a gathering of over 20 leaders of Research Invested Schools around the country. These schools are eager to connect for joint projects and shared professional learning, and to advocate for schools as learning organisations and teachers as trusted experts leading a grass-roots renewal of the teaching profession.

This article was developed in collaboration with Hugh Chilton (The Scots College), Caitlin Munday (The Scots College), Allyson Holbrook (University of Newcastle), and Carl Leonard (University of Newcastle).

Peter is Professor of Education (Innovation in Schooling & Educational Technology) at the University of Newcastle (Australia), having formerly been Professor of Education (Futures) at the Open University (UK). He has also been a primary school teacher, initial teacher educator, the Head of Department of Education at the Open University, the Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology, and Co-Editor in Chief of Computers & Education. He has brought in over £10million of external funding, most of which was focussed on issues to do with the purposes of education, the management of educational change, and enhancing education systems, informed by understandings of learning, pedagogy and the potentials of digital technology. He blogs at https://halfbaked.education, is @PeterT on Twitter and his LinkedIn profile is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-twining/.

Why we must talk about teacher professionalism now

September 27, 202121st century teaching, Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, professional development of teachers, professional standards, quality teaching, Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, Teacher professional development, teaching standardsAARE blog, Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, Diane Mayer, Education policy, initial teacher education

In 2016, Judyth Sachs reflected on her 2003 monograph ‘The Activist Teaching Profession’ and asked, ‘Teacher professionalism: Why are we still talking about it?‘. In that paper, she argued ‘the time for an industrial approach to the teaching profession has passed’ and made a case for ‘systems, schools and teachers to be more research active with teachers’ practices validated and supported through research’ (p.413). I am not sure what Judyth would say five years later but I think this is the discussion that still needs to be had. We do need to talk about teacher professionalism in Australia in 2021 and particularly the way it is being constructed and reconstructed through teacher education policy.

In 2020, Martin Mills and I compared teacher professionalism as it was constructed in teacher education policies in Australia and England, and concluded,

… derision and mistrust of teacher education is evident in both contexts. The construction of teacher professionalism through the policies in Australia and England reflects a managerial approach dominated by performance cultures, increased accountability, and teacher standards … the extent to which teachers research and improve their practices, and invoke professional judgement involving interrogation of available research … rarely feature .
Mayer & Mills, 2020, p.14

The 2014 Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) review and the resulting updated accreditation standards and procedures have constructed teacher and teacher educator professionalism in Australia. Two key drivers are evident: making sure the ‘right’ people come into the profession and making sure beginning teachers are ‘classroom ready’. Teacher education was clearly positioned as a problem that could be fixed by tighter accountability mechanisms related to these drivers.

While the TEMAG review claimed to consider ‘wide-ranging evidence and research’ in recommending that the Australian Government act ‘on the sense of urgency to immediately commence implementing actions to lift the quality of initial teacher education’ (Recommendation 2), previous government reports, governments commissioned research consultancies, and/or reports from multinational entities like the OECD and McKinsey & Company, were used to support a perceived need for change. Peer reviewed and published research by teacher education academics rarely featured. In this way, evidence to support the claims and recommendations was constructed in a particular way, supporting Helgetun and Menter’s (2020) claim that evidence is often a rationalized myth in teacher education policy because policies are regularly politically constructed and ideologically based.

An important component of the TEMAG argument and recommendations, as captured in the report’s title, was that graduates from teacher education programs must be ‘classroom ready’. As a result, teacher education accreditation requirements changed to include a final-year teaching performance assessment. This caused much upheaval, requiring significant changes to the teacher education curricula and to teacher education resourcing in order that programs remained accredited. However, little attention was given to what should be assessed; that is, what beginning teachers should know and be able to do. More attention was given to how teacher educators must design and implement the performance assessment, and various accountability mechanisms for surveillance of this process. The assumption seemed to be that the already developed Australian Professional Standards for Teachers accurately detailed the required professional knowledge, practice, and engagement, and that what was needed was a tighter accountability framework for teacher educators and their practices. Of course, regular critiques of such standards highlight how they construct a particular type of professionalism by focussing on what teachers do rather than what and how they think. None of this was not interrogated in the TEMAG review.

In addition, great emphasis was given to ensuring that the ‘right’ people come into the profession. This focus on the person (i.e., on teachers, not their teaching) resulted in recommendations about required academic skills and desirable personal attributes and characteristics for entry to teacher education programs. In the end, measures of academic skills ended up being the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) and levels of personal literacy and numeracy. Of course, many teacher education entrants are not secondary school graduates. Thus, the political and media hype about ATAR and the quality of the teaching profession is misguided. In relation to personal levels of literacy and numeracy, TEMAG recommended that teacher educators ‘demonstrate that all preservice teachers are within the top 30 per cent of the population in personal literacy and numeracy.’ Not surprisingly, this 30% category proved rather challenging to associate with a score on the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students.

Another aspect aimed at ensuring that the ‘right’ people were admitted to teacher education was the recommendation for selection processes to assess the ‘personal characteristics to become a successful teacher’ (Recommendation 10).

At its worst, this conjures up visions of the 1930s so-called teacher characteristics ‘research’ associated with what makes a good teacher (which inevitably included being female and liking children).

Ensuring the ‘right’ people come into teaching was translated into accreditation requirements for providers to use non-academic selection criteria and, in practice, this has meant everything from a short personal statement attached to applications to the use of commercially produced tests designed to assess personal characteristics. Moreover, teacher education providers were required to ‘publish all information necessary to ensure transparent and justifiable selection processes for entry into initial teacher education programs’ suggesting a mistrust in providers to make appropriate decisions about selection of entrants to their teacher education programs.

Thus, teacher professionalism in Australia is being constructed as being the right type of person with appropriate personal characteristics and levels of personal literacy and numeracy, who can demonstrate successful teaching practice against standards within a system that determines performance indicators and mechanisms for classroom readiness. Moreover, teacher educator professionalism can be interpreted as ensuring the production of graduates who are classroom ready at point of graduation via programs that are accredited using nationally consistent standards.

In Australia and in England, the relentless reviewing of teacher education continues in 2021. And, yet again, the wording does not disguise the goals of these reviews. In Australia, the ‘Quality Initial Teacher Education Review’ will consider how to attract and select high-quality candidates into the teaching profession and how to prepare ITE students to be effective teachers Nothing new to see here. In the UK, the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Market Review is focussing on ‘how the ITT sector can provide consistently high-quality training, in line with the core content framework, in a more efficient and effective market’

Do we need to keep talking about teacher and teacher educator professionalism? Definitely!

Diane Mayer is a professor of education (Teacher Education) at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney.

Are regular classroom teachers really not qualified to teach students with special needs?

July 10, 2017children with disability, Inclusive EducationAustralian Professional Standards for Teachers, children with autism, children with disabilities in schools, Ilecktra Spandagou, inclusive education, Kate de Bruin, Ken Wiltshire, Linda Graham, Pauline Hanson and children with autism, special classes for children with learning and behaviour problems

Sure enough, representatives of parent and teacher groups have emerged to back Senator Pauline Hanson’s claims that children with ‘autism and disabilities’ should be removed from mainstream classroom.

Primary principals in south western Sydney were reported as saying a shortage of places in special schools and classes is leading to the placement of students with disability or special needs into regular classes with a teacher who is “not sufficiently qualified”.

No description of the necessary qualifications was provided in the article but the implication was clear: special qualifications are needed to teach special students. In other words, a regular teacher education qualification just doesn’t cut it.

At about the same time Dr James Morton, who is Chairman of the AEIOU Foundation and parent of a child with autism, in an interview on ABC radio criticised universities for failing to prepare teachers to teach students with disability. His chief complaint was that units specialising in autism are not mandatory in undergraduate teacher education programs and accused universities of not investing in Australia’s future.

Then we had Professor Kenneth Wiltshire of the UQ Business School who argued via an opinion piece that the states had pulled a “con job… late last century” by promising “disabled students could become mainstream in every way by being included in conventional schools”. He then claims the states only supported inclusion because they were “cost-cutting by closing many special schools”.

While confused and lacking any supporting evidence, Wiltshire’s article echoes points made in the other two examples:

special students need to be educated by special teachers in special places,
regular classroom teachers are not qualified to teach students with disability and/or universities are failing to adequately prepare them
there are not enough special teachers and special places (because of inclusion and the closure of special schools).

Is there truth to any these claims?

In short, no.

Firstly, research consistently shows that educating students with disability in special places does not guarantee better academic or social outcomes, better employment prospects or post-school options and social inclusion. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This does not mean that they will do well in mainstream schools built for a narrow range of students. It means that local schools must evolve to cater to the full range of students. And this means teachers and teacher preparation must also evolve.

The 2016 Australian Senate Report made recommendations for teaching skills that would improve workforce capacity for inclusion: universal design for learning, differentiated teaching, and cooperative learning.

With this knowledge, teachers can identify what support students need to access the curriculum, engage in classroom activities, and achieve at school. These skills are emphasised in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, which since 2012 have underpinned the accreditation of university teacher education courses.

The Standards make clear that all classroom teachers are qualified to teach students with disability and/or additional needs. To be accredited, university teacher education courses must also cover four key focus areas that directly relate to students with disability: (i) differentiating teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities, (ii) supporting learning of students with disability, (iii) supporting student participation and engagement, and (iv) managing challenging behaviour.

Every graduating teacher must provide evidence that they meet each Standard to achieve registration to teach. To maintain their annual registration, existing teachers must provide evidence that they have engaged in professional learning relating to the Standards.

Clearly, there is a framework to ensure that registered classroom teachers are qualified to teach students with disabilities and/or additional needs, and for universities to prepare their graduates to do so. The benefits are seen in numerous schools and classrooms across the country, but there is scope for both teacher preparation programs and schools to embrace inclusive teaching practices.

Finally, the claim that places in special schools and classes have declined because of inclusion and the subsequent closure of special schools is completely false.

This is clear from a range of data sources.

Research from New South Wales has shown that proportion of enrolments in separate special educational settings in Australia’s largest education system has been increasing since the 1990s. In other words, the “mainstream” is shrinking.

These findings are supported by national data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC) which shows that there was a 35% increase in the number of students with disability attending special schools between 2003 and 2015.

But most telling is this: Prior to the 1992 Disability Discrimination Act, before we signed the 1994 Salamanca Statement, and before “inclusion” was really a thing, there were 444 special schools accounting for 4.4% of all schools in Australia.

Almost three decades later — after the 2005 Disability Standards for Education, the 2008 Melbourne Declaration, and a multitude of reviews and inquiries nationally – there are now 461 special schools, accounting for 4.9% of Australian schools.

That represents an 11% increase in the number of special schools and this has occurred despite evidence that inclusion leads to more positive outcomes for students with disability.

We may well be living in a post-truth world but none of the empirical evidence supports the claims being made by Hanson’s backers.

Professor Linda Graham works in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Linda coordinates Inclusive Education Theory, Policy and Practice, a core unit in the Faculty of Education’s Master of Inclusive Education and leads QUT’s Student Engagement, Learning & Behaviour Research Group (@SELB_QUT), and is a member of the Board for All Means All – Australian Alliance for Inclusive Education. She has published more than 80 books, chapters and journal articles, and is leading two current large scale projects investigating educational responses to students with learning and behavioural difficulties. Linda blogs at drlindagraham.wordpress.com.au and can often be found on Twitter: @drlindagraham

Dr Kate de Bruin works in the Faculty of Education at Monash University Her current research investigates evidence-informed practice and policy in inclusive education, with a focus developing teacher capacity for using inclusive pedagogies in ways that improve equity and quality schooling for all students, and she regularly provides professional learning to school teachers in these areas. She has worked with government departments on projects such as the Victorian Inclusion Support Programme, and the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data for Students with Disabilities.

Dr Ilektra Spandagou is a senior lecturer at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. She worked as a special teacher in mainstream settings before she completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK, in inclusive education. She has worked in inclusive education in three countries: as a researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK, and as a lecturer at the University of Athens and the University of Thessaly, Greece, before moving to The University of Sydney. Her research interests include inclusion, disability, comparative education and classroom diversity. Her current research projects focus on inclusive policy and practice within a rights perspective. A common thread of this work is a conceptual understanding of inclusive education as a transformation project requiring a paradigmatic shift in perceptions of both ability and education. Her publications include the book ‘Inclusive Education: International Policy & Practice’ (co-authored with A.C. Armstrong and D. Armstrong) published by Sage in 2010.