Evidencing Quality Teaching as part of Globalizing Neoliberal Agendas

Author(s):

Diane Mayer(presenting / submitting)Andrea Allard(presenting)Julianne Moss

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 10 B, Parallel Paper Session

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-20

15:30-17:00

Room:

FCEE - Aula 2.2

Chair:

Judith Harford

Contribution

This paper examines notions of ‘quality teaching’ currently being debated in Australia and interrogates related notions of ‘evidence’ of quality teaching as part of the globalizing neoliberal agendas at work in many countries. In many nations, teacher education is seen as a policy issue (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005) with teacher education governance has been characterised by an increasing focus on outcomes, particularly student learning outcomes and whether or not teacher education makes a difference to student learning in classrooms. In this context, it is argued that the most appropriate policies and practices for teacher education should be decided according to empirical evidence about their value-addedness in relation to student achievement. In this paper, conceptions of quality teaching and teacher education effectiveness are analyzed within Australia’s Smarter Schools – Improving Teacher Quality National Partnership (TQNP) program designed to restructure and revitalize the teaching profession over five years. Within this framing, we present an investigation of how assessment of graduating teachers’ practice against professional standards for teaching constitutes authentic evidence of quality teaching and effectiveness of teacher education.

Australia, like other nations, faces an increasingly complex ‘apparatus of certification and regulation’ (Connell, 2009, p. 214) that keep teachers and initial teacher education (ITE) courses under close surveillance. Entry to the teaching profession in Australia is regulated by state agencies that use input models to make decisions about teacher registration and readiness to teach. Judgments are made about the quality of a teacher education program usually by paper review involving a panel of stakeholders deciding on the likelihood that the program will prepare a competent beginning teacher. Then, employers and teacher registration authorities use proxies like completion of the accredited teacher education program, grades in university subjects or practicum evaluation forms and observations of teaching to make a judgment about a graduating teacher‘s level of professional knowledge and practice - about their readiness to teach. However, authentic assessments of the actual professional practice of teachers in the workplace, incorporating multiple measures, and focussing on judging the impact of teachers on student learning, are seldom used as means to assess graduate readinesss to teach. This absence has become more relevant with the recent introduction of the new national system of accreditation in Australia (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011) and the requirement that teacher education providers provide evidence that graduates can demonstrate national graduate standards. In debates national and international regarding effectiveness of teacher education programs, and the ‘quality’ of new graduates, teacher education researchers are struggling to be heard. It is true that like our colleagues in other countries, we ‘seem ill prepared to respond to critics who question the value of professional education for teachers with evidence of our effectiveness’ (Grossman, 2008, p.13). This study aims to provide such evidence.

Method

In this paper, we report research that investigated the effectiveness of a capstone teacher performance assessment, known as the Deakin Authentic Teacher Assessment (ATA), designed to enable pre-service teachers demonstrate the quality of their professional knowledge and practice as beginning teachers. Three different data sources are analysed: program accreditation documents; transcripts of individual interviews with pre-service teachers who completed the ATA; and an analysis of the written documentation that pre-service teachers completed. Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 1999, 2001) is used to examine the above as texts in order to explore: how ‘graduate teacher’ is constructed in each document; the tensions and synchronicities that exist between the ATA as a capstone assessment and the National Professional Standards, as each seeks to provide evidence of graduate teachers’ work readiness; and, how pre-service teachers make sense of their professional identities in light of the Standards and the ATA.

Expected Outcomes

Issues of quality teaching are examined constituting evidence that goes beyond the “commonsense realism” (Law, 2005, p.597) and “methodological cleanliness” (p. 595) that often characterizes the research used as evidence in policy formation and the subsequent procedures and practices. Moreover, we examine notions of quality teaching in a global context (e.g. Goodwin, 2010) and challenge the view that student learning outcome evidence is sufficient as a measure of teacher effectiveness (cf. Darling-Hammond et al., 2010). We argue that an inquiry stance by teacher educators is critical to maintaining a voice in order to ‘speak with and back to’ the current discourse around what counts as ‘evidence’. This session will communicate the wider debates in teacher education illustrating the fragility of the Australian context and point to the importance of ongoing collaborations and dialogue with key stakeholders in order to develop a robust footing for scaled up teacher education research that is not only local, but is networked across countries. Without this deliberative pattern of teacher education scholarship, teacher education will be lost to the policy entanglement and is likely to become a reductive mandated arm of government authorities lacking rigor and critical sensibilities.

References

Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership. (2011). Accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia: Standards and Procedures. Carlton, Victoria: Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA). Cochran-Smith, M., & Fries, M. (2005). Researching Teacher Education in Changing Times: Politics and Paradigms. In M. Cochran-Smith & K. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying Teacher Education: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Connell, R.W. (2009). Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism, Critical Studies in Education, 50:3, 213-229. Darling-Hammond, L., Newton, X., & Wei, R. C. (2010). Evaluating Teacher Education Outcomes: A Study of the Stanford Teacher Education Programme. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, 36(4), 369-388. Fairclough, N. 2003. Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York: Routledge. Gee, J. 1999. An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York: Routledge. Gee, J. 2001. Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education, Review of Research in Education, Vol. 25 (2000-2001), p. 99-125. Goodwin, A. L. (2010). Globalization and the Preparation of Quality Teachers: Rethinking Knowledge Domains for Teaching. Teaching Education, 21(1), 19-32. Grossman, P. (2008). Responding to our critics: From crisis to opportunity in research on teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 10-23. Law, J. (2005). Making a mess with method. The Sage handbook of social science methodology, W. Outhwaite and S. P. Turner (Eds), pp. 595-606. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage publications.

Author Information

Diane Mayer (presenting / submitting)

Victoria University

Melbourne

Andrea Allard (presenting)

Deakin Univerity, Australia

Julianne Moss

Deakin University