Session Information
15 SES 09 A, National Partnership Initiatives
Paper Session
Contribution
In 2019, the 8th World Congress of Education International passed a resolution to implement the joint Educational International/UNESCO Global Framework of Professional Teaching Standards (EI & UNESCO, 2019), stating that “Teacher professionalism is not negotiable” (p. ii). Informed by the successful implementation of professional teaching standards in Australia, Canada and Scotland (Alegounarias, 2019), the Standards assist nations to realise the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4 on Quality Education.
Coupling Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) instruments to professional teaching standards is well-established in jurisdictions in the USA, and they have recently been mandated in Australia (Stacey et al., 2019). Some scholars view TPAs as an effective means of capturing the complexity of teaching (Darling-Hammond, 2006), a valid and authentic assessments of a PST’s ‘readiness to teach’ (Darling-Hammond, 2012) and for providing PSTs ‘with the skills necessary to help their students learn’ (Bartoletti et al., 2014, pp. 32-33). Other scholars see TPAs are standardisation mechanisms (Kornfeld et al., 2007) that rely are nothing more than templated versions of best practice (Davies & Bansel, 2010).
The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) sets the standards for teachers and for accreditation of all initial teacher education (ITE) courses in the nation (AITSL, 2011) and has mandated that every ITE program must include a TPA designed to demonstrate that each graduating teacher is “classroom ready” (AITSL, 2016). The Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) is a TPA that has been developed by a Consortium of higher education providers from across Australia. The AfGT was developed ‘from the ground up’ by a community of initial teacher educators from across the Consortium, to ensure applicability across diverse settings, different levels of programs (undergraduate and graduate entry) and different modes of delivery (face-to-face, online and blended). The AfGT is a high-stakes summative, capstone TPA, which requires PSTs to collect evidence to demonstrate the impact of their teaching on student learning through the processes of planning, teaching, assessing and evaluating.
We–members of the AfGT Design Team who have worked on the team for varying periods of time over the past four years—knew that considerable expertise existed to develop a high-stakes assessment task within the community of initial teacher educators in the Consortium. There were inherent tensions in undertaking such a task, not only because some members were located up to 3,000 km apart, but also in attempting to ensure instrument fidelity and fairness for PSTs undertaking this assessment.
The processes of development of assessment that span multiple universities has received less attention than the effects of TPAs, so the focus of this presentation is not on the instrument itself, but on reporting on the social processes that occurred when designing and developing the AfGT. Significantly, this collective considers the experience to be an unusual one, yet one that has led to a very powerful approach to the design of a high-stakes assessment task.
The research question informing our study was:
What does the development of a high-stakes mandatory capstone assessment mean for the initial teacher educators who co-designed the instrument?
This presentation details the processes and dispositions that enabled members of the AfGT Design Team to collaboratively design and refine a summative assessment task. Whereas the outcomes from our study are not generalisable to other contexts, we consider that the learning that we have gained as a consequence of engaging in this collaborative and participatory work will provide insights to initial teacher educators from international contexts who are in the process of, or about to, develop high-stakes assessment tasks to address professional teaching standards.
Method
This study is part of a larger longitudinal research project and the research presented in this proposal utilises collaborative self-study (Davey & Ham, 2009) in order to “illustrate tensions, dilemmas and concerns about practice and programs” (Loughran & Russell, 2002, p. 244). This research method engaged us as researchers and dialogic partners in the development of a summative, high stakes national assessment task. The team-authored collaborative self-study involved six authors from a cross-section of universities, representing a spectrum of career levels. The team established equal ways of working and explored the knowledge constructed through sharing recollections and experiences over a period of time. The data were generated and interrogated both individually and collaboratively (May & Pattillo-McCoy, 2000) and were gathered from two key sources: 1. Participant responses to stem questions, based on the research sub-questions including asynchronous data from online engagement and 2. Face-to-face focused synchronous conversations. The data were transcribed and collated using a clustered matrix framework (Miles et al., 2014), as a means to identify, examine and interrogate the themes and concepts. Verbatim quotes were identified and organised into ‘like’ categories and entered into this matrix. By reading horizontally across the rows, the profile of each participant is visible and enabled the participants’ responses to each sub-theme to be considered. By reading vertically down the columns, the combined responses of all participants for each sub-theme is laid out, enabling the researchers to identify similarities and to make comparisons and contrasts in order to draw conclusions. The three identified key themes included: Leadership and Social Processes (L&SP), Tensions (T) and Dispositions (D), together with a number of sub-themes. These sub- themes included the leadership team actively modelling trust and respect (10 mentions); the iterative, ongoing, purposeful and dynamic nature of the process (10 mentions) and dialogic, social processes and communication across universities (L&SP, 8 mentions). Key disposition sub-themes included the genuine sense of care and optimism (5 mentions); inherent respect for diverse people, places and positions (4 mentions) and a common appreciation for mess and change (6 mentions). Some key sub-themes identified in Tensions included making something complex, simplistic (8 mentions); the importance of diversity or homogeneity (6 mentions); working with colleagues from other universities (12 mentions) and the influence of political systems and policies (6 mentions).
Expected Outcomes
The processes existed in complex and interrelated ways to influence and inspire members of the Design Team. Collaborative leadership modelled ways for the team to identify, grapple with and resolve multiple challenges. Genuine and generative collaboration emerged from the democratic approaches taken, with team members reporting how they reflected on their own values and institutional practices, as they considered new perspectives and learnt alongside their contemporaries. Despite some tentativeness about venturing into the TPA space, the designers put their trust in the collective effort, and although there is little guidance on either how to be collegial or supportive during times of rapid change in universities (Selkrig et al., 2019), a preparedness by the Consortium’s leaders to adopt a distributed approach to leadership (Harris, 2013) and a commitment to initiating and modelling collegial working arrangements (Scott et al.,2008), were recognised as being transformational to the work of the team. Tensions centred around accommodating diversity, ways of working with colleagues from other institutions and influencing political systems and policies. These tensions arose naturally from the team’s philosophical views on initial teacher education, their experiences in the development and implementation of the TPA and their pragmatic responses to current policy requirements. The trust and collaboration that was created within the Consortium enabled the team to respond collegially to these tensions. The dispositions of people in the design team were important in creating ways of working, with an underpinning and genuine sense of care and optimism, and respect for diverse perspectives being evident. A high level of trust was developed in which people offered expertise and took risks, with the team valuing the specialised knowledge brought to the table. Importantly, the team was adept at accepting the messiness of continual ‘work in progress’ and multiple cycles of refining and trialling.
References
Alegounarias, T. (2019). A framework of professional teaching standards. Retrieved from https://download.ei-ie.org/Docs/WebDepot/A-Framework-of-Professional-Teaching-Standards.pdf Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2011). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Carlton South, VIC: Education Services Australia. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). Guidelines for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia. Melbourne: AITSL. Bartoletti, J., Connelly, G., Domenech, D., & Robinson, S. (2014). Why performance assessments for new teachers make sense. Education Week, 33(28), 32-33. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/04/10/28robinson.h33.html Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Assessing teacher education: The usefulness of multiple measures for assessing program outcomes. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(2), 120-138. Darling-Hammond, L. (2012). The right start: Creating a strong foundation for the teaching career. The Phi Delta Kappan, 94(3), 8-13. Davey, R., & Ham, V. (2009). Team-based approaches to self-study in teacher education. In C. A. Lassonde, S. Galman, & C. Kosnik (Eds.), Self-study Research Methodologies for Teacher Educators (pp. 187-203). Rotterdam: Sense. Davies, B., & Bansel, P. (2010). Governmentality and academic work: Shaping the hearts and minds of academic workers. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(3), 5-20. May, R. A. B., & Pattillo-McCoy, M. (2000). Do you see what I see? Examining a collaborative ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(1), 65-87. Educational International & UNESCO. (2019). Global framework of professional teaching standards. UNESCO Retrieved from https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2019_ei-unesco_framework?fr=sYTQ5MDQxMzY3Ng Harris, A. (2013). Distributed leadership: Friend or foe? Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 41(5), 545-554. Kornfeld, J., Grady, K., Marker, P. M., & Ruddell, M. R. (2007). Caught in the current: A self-study of state-mandated compliance in a teacher education program. Teachers College Record, 109(8), 1902-1930. Loughran, J. J., & Russell, T. (2002). Improving Teacher Education Practice Through Self-study. London, UK: Routledge Falmer. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, G., Coates, H., & Anderson, M. (2008). Learning leaders in times of change: Academic leadership capabilities for Australian higher education. Sydney: University of Sydney & ACER. Selkrig, M. A., Keamy, R. K., Sadler, K., & Manathunga, C. (2019). Making visible collegiality of a different kind. In D. Bottrell & C. Manathunga (Eds.), Prising open the cracks of neoliberal universities: Palgrave Macmillan. Stacey, M., Talbot, D., Buchanan, J. & Mayer, D. (2019) The development of an Australian teacher performance assessment: Lessons from the international literature, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.
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