Category: Teachers

There was much wringing of hands at the continuing decline in Australia’s reading, mathematics and science results revealed by the results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) published last December. Unfortunately, there was little in the way of constructive analysis of the factors behind the declines.

Continue reading “Australia Has High Quality Teaching but Too Much Out-of-Field Teaching”

Competition and choice policies in education are leading to the de-professionalization of teaching. A policy brief published by the US National Education Policy Centre titled Reversing the Deprofessionalization of Teaching says that it is being driven by fast-track teacher preparation, teacher evaluation based on student test scores and the use of scripted, narrow curricula.

Continue reading “The De-Professionalization of Teaching”

School teaching is a craft. A school teacher is an adult in a room full of children and the task is to look after the children, supervise their social behaviour, and give them skills and knowledge.

When I use the word ‘craft’, I don’t mean making things out of seashells. I mean an activity that involves using skill to achieve a practical end. You learn how to teach by doing it. Parenting skills are probably the most valuable skills to have. There are many teaching methods and every teaching situation is different, so a teacher needs to have many techniques and must constantly be thinking about which ones to use.

Continue reading “Reflections on Teaching: The Craft of Teaching”

Surveys of beginning teachers by the Australian Secondary Principals’ Association in the middle years of the last decade provided conclusive data that teacher trainees valued very highly their experiences in schools prior to graduation, in many cases finding this more useful than some of the experiences in their tertiary institutions. So, principals have a significant responsibility in making this experience as valuable as possible, especially as we want high quality teachers in every classroom in every school. Continue reading “Principal Leadership Makes Teacher Training Effective”

Despite working longer hours and facing more challenging circumstances than teachers in many other countries, Australian teachers report high job satisfaction and strong self-belief about their ability to help students learn. However, they need to be better supported by the community in the challenging job they do on behalf of society.

These results come from the Teaching and Learning International Survey, recently published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It provides a detailed picture of the experiences of lower secondary teachers across 34 countries, including 24 OECD countries. Continue reading “Australian Teachers Work Longer Hours and Face More Challenges Than Teachers in Many Countries”

An evaluation of Teach for Australia carried out by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) shows that it is a very high cost program but fails to demonstrate that it has improved school outcomes or teacher retention in disadvantaged schools.

The cost of training TFA associates vastly exceeds that of traditional university-based training. Retention of TFA teachers is well below that of mainstream teaching graduates and a significant proportion of those who remain in teaching transfer out of disadvantaged schools. There is no robust evidence that TFA teachers are more successful in improving student results in disadvantaged schools than university-trained teachers. Continue reading “Teach for Australia is Not Cost-effective”

A guest column by a school principal on the ‘hare-brained’ teacher appraisal scheme introduced by the Victorian Government. Continue reading “The Victorian Government is Floundering in Education”

The Business Council of Australia recently released an economic action plan for Australia. One among a number of recommendations is to devolve power over teacher salaries to school principals and allow them to pay teachers according to their performance.

No evidence is offered to support the recommendation. If the BCA had looked it would have found that the weight of research evidence shows that performance pay has no effect on student achievement (see here and here). The deputy director for education at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher, has said that the international evidence reveals “no relationship” between student test results and the use of performance pay. Continue reading “Business Council Ignores Evidence on Performance Pay”

Professor Stephen Dinham, Chair of Teacher Education at the University of Melbourne, recently delivered the Phillip Hughes Oration at the Australian College of Education in Canberra on 28 February. He said that the quality teaching movement is in danger of being hijacked by naive, ill-informed, half-baked solutions and that education has become the ‘battered profession’ subjected to ‘blanket stigmatisation’. The following is an abridged version of the oration. Continue reading ““Blanket Stigmatisation” and “Battering” of Teachers Must End”

A study of three teacher performance pay schemes in the United States has found that they did not change teaching motivation and practices.

The study concluded that “there is limited evidence that any of the three programs changed teachers’ instructional practices, especially practices significantly associated with student achievement”. It said that “the lack of program impact on teachers’ practices suggests that more careful thinking about the logic model of incentive pay programs is necessary.” Continue reading “Incentive Pay Schemes do not Change Teaching Practices”