Internationally, there is growing pressure for teacher education programs to demonstrate their effectiveness in preparing the next generation of teachers for the classroom.   As an initial step to improve graduate teacher effectiveness, teacher education providers are being asked to set more rigorous academic admission procedures. For example, in Australia The Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers report by the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group recommended that teacher education providers utilise measures for selecting teaching candidates, to ensure they possess the right “skills and dispositions” to develop into successful teachers.  In addition, there is an imperative to provide selection procedures that respond to the needs of identified equity and under-represented groups and people from diverse educational backgrounds (DEEWR, 2008).

Since 2012, The University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education has developed and deployed an innovative, research-based approach to student selection for their ITE programs called TeacherSelector; this selection procedure has also been adopted by other national and international universities and organisations for selection and ranking of student candidates. TeacherSelector is l comprised of five sets of procedures and is designed to lead candidates through a reflective process as well as providing information to universities and tertiary institutions about each candidate’s experiences, capabilities and qualities. 

This symposium will elaborate on the development and findings from TeacherSelector including its research underpinnings in relation to best practice in assessing a prospective teacher’s suitability and potential for success in the teaching profession. The first presentation will present the results of a conceptual and empirical validation of questionnaires and assessments in the model to demonstrate the robustness of the characteristics and abilities being measured.  The second presentation will then leverage off the findings of the first to illustrate the predictive capacity of the model with respect to course performance.  Finally, the third presentation will present a selection framework within which Teacherselector is situated, reflect on learnings from this first phase of research and outline future plans for the model as it moves beyond selection to development, providing timely and robust evaluative feedback to pre-service teachers as well as valuable information to teacher education. In particular, it will present reflections from Australian and international collaborations with TeacherSelector.  This symposium has significance at multiple levels including policy, schools and higher education institutions both nationally and internationally.

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