What Happened to the National Review of Teacher Education?

Inquiries and reviews of teacher education have occurred with remarkable regularity in Australia over recent years. What is also remarkable about these often major and expensive enterprises is how regularly their recommendations have been deflected or ignored

Assessing accomplished teaching with reliability and validity: The ACER Portfolio Project

We know that good teachers are worth their weight in gold. But if good teaching is to be truly valued, the teaching profession must be able to demonstrate that it can evaluate itself in ways that are reliable, valid and fair. This capacity is central to any profession. It is also central to lifting the status of teaching, rewarding accomplished teaching and enabling teaching to complete with other professions for our ablest graduates. Recent OECD reports emphasise the necessity of strengthening the teaching profession, which depends upon widespread use of evidence-based teaching practices. Building the capacity for evaluation is the purpose of the ACER Portfolio Project: to develop valid and feasible methods by which teachers can demonstrate the ways in which they meet the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Highly Accomplished level. This presentation reviews the work of the Portfolio Project in developing an assessment and evaluation framework for Highly Accomplished teaching, piloting the assessment tasks with teachers, training assessors, setting standards, and identifying benchmarks for highly accomplished teaching

Strengthening the profession? A comparison of recent reforms in the UK and the USA

Educational policy makers in many countries recognise the need to focus their policies more directly on factors affecting the quality of teachers. Common to these policies are attempts to reform teachers\u27 pay systems and career paths to place greater value on teachers\u27 work and give stronger incentives for professional development. Investing in effective modes of on going professional learning is regarded increasingly as one of the most effective means of improving student learning outcomes. This article examines two approaches to reforming the teaching profession, one from the UK, the other in the USA. In the case of the UK, the focus is on a comprehensive government \u27performance management\u27 system for the teaching profession in England and Wales, introduced in 2000. In the USA, the focus is on \u27professional certification\u27; an emerging system for giving recognition to \u27accomplished\u27 teachers provided by an independent professional body, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Both reforms aim to improve the attractiveness of teaching as a career and to provide teachers with greater rewards for evidence of professional development. These two approaches to assessing teacher performance for career progression are compared on a number of criteria, particularly their capacity to engage all teachers in effective forms of professional development and assist them to reach their full potential, the fundamental aspiration of any performance management system. Each depends, of course, on credible methods for assessing teacher performance. One, it is argued, looks backwards and has little chance of achieving its aim; the other points to a possible future and has the potential to radically change the way we think about professional development and methods for assessing teacher performance. It recognises the power of professional forms of recognition and demonstrates the commitment teachers are prepared to give to the task of developing their own standards and methods for assessing performance. This paper argues that commitment of the profession to reforms such as these will depend on the creation of independent institution through which the profession can exercise a major responsibility for these tasks. A central purpose of such an institution would be to enable the teaching profession and education authorities to talk with each other on equal terms and to exercise their shared responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning in schools

Professional certification: Promoting and recognising successful teaching practices

This paper focuses on the challenge of developing a system forrecognising and rewarding accomplished teachers operated by the teaching profession – a standards-based professional learning and certification system. While the focus is on recent Australian experience, it draws on the experience of several countries that have sought to reform teacher career structures and pay systems so that there is a closer alignment between career progression and increasing expertise. Over the past twenty years or so, teacher associations in several countries have demonstrated that the profession has the ability to reach a consensus on teaching standards without imposing uniformity of teaching style. These standards indicate that the profession can lay down long term professional development goals for its members based on research and successful professional practice. A standards-based professional learning and certification system has the potential to overcome major limitations in traditional systems of professional learning for teachers: the lack of clarity about what teachers should get better at; the lack of incentive to attain high teaching standards, and the low level of ownership and control teachers have over the professional development system

National Curriculum and National Professional Standards: Potentially a Powerful Partnership

The author discusses the potential impact on Australian education of the creation of the interim National Curriculum Board (NCB) and subsequently the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and of the National Partnership on Quality Teaching (NPQT). The author argues that their roles should be seen as distinct, but complementary and mutually reinforcing – which has important implications for the new national curriculum, the success of which will depend fundamentally on the willingness and capacity of teachers to meet related standards

HALT Certification: Reducing the workload, increasing the rigour and cutting the cost

In December 2022, federal, state and territory education ministers released a National Teacher Workforce Action Plan to improve teacher supply and retention in the profession. While recognising the important role that Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT) certification could play, the plan also recognised that the current approach to certification was cumbersome for teachers and called for it to be ‘streamlined’. At the request of the education ministers, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) has produced a revised Framework for the Certification of HALT Teachers. Guided by the Framework, certifying authorities across state and territory school systems will be responsible for ‘less onerous, while being rigorous’ processes for assessing applications. This paper is based on a project called the Portfolio Project conducted by ACER between 2015 and 2018 to develop methods to reduce the application workload for teachers and assessors while increasing the validity and reliability of the certification process. These methods were trialed with positive results. Based on lessons learned during the Project, this paper suggests ways to strengthen the efficiency and credibility of the HALT certification process, while also making it a more satisfying and effective vehicle for teachers’ professional development

Initiatives to address teacher shortage

This paper is in response to an invitation from the Victorian Department of Education and Training to undertake a targeted review of effective teaching recruitment strategies. The paper provides a ‘snapshot’ of what is happening in other States and Territories and in selected countries overseas. The review is based mainly on information supplied by a small group of stakeholders (See Appendix 1) and derived from relevant printed and online resources. The main focus of the review is on the kinds of strategies that different educational jurisdictions have used to overcome teacher supply problems. The original intention of the review was to focus only on those strategies that were seen to be effective but this was broadened to include unproven and pilot strategies. This is because the majority of initiatives have only been operating for a short time, in some cases for less than twelve months, in other cases for only one or two years. This has not been long enough for an evaluation to have been carried out. A second problem relates to measuring ‘effectiveness’. Often the success of strategies is measured in quantitative terms, such as the number of applicants for teaching scholarships, the proportion of schools that report recruitment difficulties or the length of service in a remote school. The teacher supply problem is not simply one of increasing teacher numbers however. Before developing further strategies or refining the ones that already exist in Victoria, it would be worthwhile clarifying the criteria for ‘effectiveness’. Is the initiative able to attract the most able candidates, for example? Is it sustainable? Does it enhance the status of teaching? Does it encourage a long-term commitment from teachers? The problem of teacher demand and supply is both cyclical and complex with a range of interconnecting variables. It is usually most evident when ‘an underlying weakness in the supply pool is coincident with demographic or policy change which places additional strain on the supply pool’.1 This review looks briefly at practices in other Australian States and Territories, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and New Zealand

Evaluation of the Standards and Professional Learning Project 2003

In February 2003, the Victorian State Minister for Education and Training launched the ‘Standards and Professional Learning Project’ as the first major policy initiative of the new Institute. The brief of the project was: to develop professional teaching standards for full registration, and to support new teachers (who were mostly newly graduated teachers from tertiary teacher education programs) to move from provisional to full registration at the end of their first year of teaching. This involved designing and implementing evidence based assessment processes to show that the standards had been met. These assessments would provide guarantees of teacher quality to the public and to the teaching profession in Victoria

Teacher Education Courses In Victoria: Perceptions Of Their Effectiveness And Factors Affecting Their Impact

Investment in teacher education is a major strategy to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in our schools. Agencies, such as the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT), with responsibility for the accreditation of teacher education, can use feedback about the effectiveness of different modes of teacher preparation to support providers. It is vital that data for this purpose be valid and reliable. The Future Teachers Project (FTP) was designed to collect such data. It was designed to address two major questions: What are the perceptions of stakeholders (beginning teachers and their employers) about the effectiveness of current teacher education models in Victoria? What changes do stakeholders believe should be made to teacher education programs to better prepare future teachers

Research on performance pay for teachers

This report falls into three main sections, in accordance with the project brief. The first provides an overview of current pay arrangements and collective enterprise bargaining agreements for teachers in Australian schools. Within these arrangements, the report gives particular attention to provisions for performance-based pay schemes and to identifying potential impediments to the introduction of performance-based pay for teachers. The second part of the brief called for an overview of recent Australian and international research on the attitudes of stakeholders to performance-based pay schemes for teachers and the impact of these schemes on, for example, teacher retention, improved teaching standards, improved student outcomes and recognition of accomplished teachers. The third part of the brief asked for gaps in the Australian and international evidence base on performance pay to be identified and for suggestions about further research that would be valuable in assessing the value and/or acceptance of performance-based pay for teachers in the Australian context