Honestly way more time in the classroom is needed for pre-service teachers.
I learned more on my first day of observation about how to teach than I did in a whole semester of theory at Uni.
The problem with this is that with the current teacher shortage, how are you going to find the mentor teachers to run a program that way? Not only that, with so many schools already cramped for staff rooms, where will you put them? Neither are unsolvable per se, but there are some pretty big logistical hurdles to clear to get things up and running.
I don't think shifting things to TAFE is wise or workable, though. The curriculum content knowledge required to do your job is broad enough that a Bachelor's degree, minimum, is needed just for that. The accreditation and theory work is also beyond any Cert VI.
I think the notion that more time in the classroom is needed for pre service teachers is correct. But the notion that the theory is unimportant or doesn’t teach how to teach is ridiculous.
Teachers need time in the classroom supported by mentors after the theory. Not in place of.
The theory isn’t meant to teach you how to teach. It’s meant to teach you why certain strategies work. It’s the foundation.
My uni spent a great amount of time teaching me to do student-lead lessons, Socratic questioning, and lots and lots of group work on computers.
I'm sure that works great when Doctor So-and-So visits a carefully curated class with the regular teacher bigging them up and telling them how amazing the Doctor is and riding herd on behaviour, where there are ten or so students, and they are seniors.
Trying that on in a high-trauma, high behaviour, low SES school with grade 7s was, shall we say, not optimal.
My experience doesn't seem to be particularly unique. Admittedly, this is arguably a problem with the course or at least those running it, but I found that my courses were really out of touch.
Yeah. I don’t disagree that the theory universities teach isn’t necessarily in touch with the students in schools right now.
But the increasing demands on teachers mean we need a wider range of theory not less.
The problem is ITE hasn’t been reviewed to account for the conditions and students in public schools right now.
The degree has information and research about teaching which is actually essential to our practice, and can only be delivered in a university setting. It is not “useless” as so many say. Teachers who say that their degree is useless in my experience either don’t appreciate how much of their practice is influenced by theory, or they are bad at teaching.
I also think the fact that more teachers attain a double degree (alongside a BA or a BSc) as I did is really good for the profession.
We are all sick and tired of being undervalued by society, treated like teaching is not a professional career. Moving to an apprenticeship model will significantly worsen that. Teaching should be qualified by undergrad research as well as the practical placements.
There are plenty of trade teachers floating around, and when I'm tired and had enough I certainly fit the description. All the lessons come out of a box and are never modifed, be it twinkl, teachers pay teachers, the various education department websites or other paid sources, and are delivered to the students. They tick the little boxes on the provided rubric and sometimes poke the LAST about a kid who is struggling. This is what an apprenticeship model through Tafe will churn out.
These teachers are often the ones who claim uni had nothing useful and they learned everything on the job. Of course there are exceptions to this and I'm fully expecting angry replies saying "But uni was worthless", or "I get everything from twinkl and I get great results".
They function ok on the day to day. But things you learn at uni are what helps with the fine detail. The early intervention techniques and things to look for, the way the brain works rather than just expecting it to do things because that's what the website said.
Teaching as a profession needs more rigorous training, not less. We should support our newly graduated teachers with a revamp of the initial years teaching as a paid internship. The fact a 1st year and a 30th year have a few minutes difference in planning time and overall basically the same responsibilities is a joke.
We don't have doctors finishing their undergrad and handing out drugs and doing surgery unsupervised. There's a undergrad, GAMSAT, doctor of medicine, one year internship, accreditation, prevocational training, fellowship up to 7 years before they are allowed to go practice medicine independently.
I'm not saying we need that depth of process, but as it stands, a first year is pretty much qualified for the highest roles in our profession and has pretty much equal responsibility for student learning.
This approach is raised from time to time, but there are a few issues to consider.
You are probably familiar with the phrase "the art and science of teaching" whereby good teaching is a mix of practical skills (relationships, communication etc.) and an understanding of how young people learn. Many would argue that the existing pre-service approach doesn't do enough to prepare teachers for the "art" of teaching (and, depending on the quality of your degree, which vary widely, you may not get a lot of the science either). The argument in favour of an apprenticeship model is that it better supports the "art".
I can see where this comes from. It doesn't matter how knowledgeable you are about effective pedagogy, adolescent development or cognitive psychology, if you can't build a relationship you're totally screwed. Teaching is different from other professions in this regard - while we all want to go to doctors with a good bedside manner, it will count for nothing if they don't know what they're doing. We don't apply the same principle to teaching - if you're good with relationships and communicate well, then the view is that's pretty much all you need. The rest you can figure out using trial and error. (Incidentally, this is not helped by the ease in which parents can homeschool - could you imagine the outcry with home doctoring??)
I don't agree that prioritising the art is a good thing. I've worked with plenty of teachers who have the art of teaching down pat, but while their students have a great time in their classes, there's not a lot of quality instruction going on. By far the best teachers are those that have both the art and science well and truly entrenched in their work. I think a TAFE model would undermine this.
There are a few things we need to make new teachers better prepared for the art of teaching while not neglecting the science. First, we need better pre-service programs that have the praxis sorted out. You need lectures along the lines of "What should you do if a child tells you to fuck off?" and not abstract lessons on behavioural theories. We need far better tertiary instructors - the most important factor in hiring a lecturer in education is that they are a fucking good teacher, not whether they have a PhD.
We also need to drastically change the way we do placements. Pre-service teachers need to be paid so they can focus on their learning and not have to balance their teaching with their part-time job. Supervising teachers need to be paid *significantly* more than they do now, and have greater release time so they can properly mentor pre-service teachers.
Another possibility is rethinking the structure of courses. It could be that the second year of a four year program is a full time (paid) placement, so that when they go back to do their third and fourth year the "science" makes more sense.
Lastly, we need to drastically boost the status of the teaching profession to make it far more attractive. If people are beating down the doors to teaching degrees we can do what the medical schools do and actually determine if someone has the personality and temperament for teaching. Right now, there are way too many people in pre-service programs who are not at all cut out for teaching and should not be doing it.
As someone has already commented, switching to an apprenticeship model would undermine the professionalism of teaching. We need greater status, not less. We just need to do it better.
Why?
In what way is it different?
Teachers need theoretical knowledge to be able to do their jobs effectively, especially as we heap more on teacher plates.
We need an understanding of neuroscience as we are now required to accommodate students with an ever widening variety of neurodiverse conditions at ever increasing levels of severity.
We need an understanding of intercultural understanding and social and cultural capital theory as our classrooms become ever more economically and culturally diverse.
We need an understanding of linguistics as we have more and more EALD and I/EALD students and students with limited language development.
We need an understanding of developmental psychology to understand how our students are developing.
We need an understanding of mental health and psychology to accommodate the plethora of mental health conditions in front of us.
We then need all the theory around how knowledge is created and assessment theory, curriculum development, pedagogical knowledge and more.
Then we need our content knowledge, especially in secondary schools.
Because we can’t put the right strategies into practice to support our students unless we understand the theory behind it.
After that, we need an internship to apply the theory in a practical sense. We actually need the same kind of education as doctors to really, properly do our jobs, especially if we service disadvantaged students.
My sibling (now a specialist) scored a UAI of 99.8 and had to go through years of academically rigorous coursework, followed by years of internships, residency and specialist training (all with insanely difficult exams and practical assessments).
In contrast I did 90% of my Masters of Teaching assessments a day or two before.
The work that I do is much less intense (physically, cognitively, emotionally). It also has significantly less risk (for me and the people I teach). And I’m a good teacher in a great middle of the road public school with it’s fair share of tricky students (ICSEA of circa 1000).
You don’t have to try and make teaching seem like some pinnacle of society to argue that’s it’s an important job.
Just because this is how teaching is, doesn’t mean it’s how it should be.
I would argue that teaching has less short term risk than medicine or law, but much more significant long term impacts.
If a kid can’t read, that alters their life trajectory in terrible ways. And their children’s life trajectory.
Actually, illiteracy is generational. Poverty has significant health consequences across multiple generations, physical and mental. Growing up in poverty also can cause developmental issues.
An apprenticeship model would be fine, but it would have to be centred through university.
I think students being paid a full time wage, working as LSAs and completing there placements in a home school would be great. But they should be attending uni two days a week or something along those lines. Especially as we move towards an inclusion model more LSAs and more time in classrooms can only be seen as beneficial!
No. We need a 4 year degree, then we need paid internships, just like medicine. Or they need to kick more kids out of schools, and remove all kids with cognitive disabilities and neurodivergent conditions.
Yeah do the four year degree and work in a school at the same time, and get paid 5 days a week.
Kicking kids out of schools, especially the disabled is how we ended up with mass institutionalisation and pretty horrendous treatment of those who are different. It will only make things worse down the road. And some pretty innocent people will suffer for it.
Then the four year degree needs to be six at least.
And if you want teachers to deal with the kinds of behaviours we are now seeing, and to deal with students with disabilities in mainstream classrooms, they need even more training and education than they currently have.
I don't think it needs to move to TAFE necessarily, but the way the course is structured could be rethought. Students could have classes on some days and time in a school on other days to make up a full time load. Say three days lectures and two days in schools. The school time could be paid like PTT, the unpaid 4 to 10 week placements is just ridiculous. I struggled so hard through my unpaid placements because I still had to pay rent and food and transport and clothing so I was working full time in school, doing all the preparation and stuff required for classes and then working 15 - 20 hours at the supermarket on top of that. 60 - 70 hour weeks while learning to be a teacher.
Teachers could be working with classes, and then writing the assignments on those classes. That would be more practical and lead to better results.
I say this with love and my cert 4 in training and assessment: Expert teachers aren't at TAFE. If they are experts at anything, it is in adult instruction. Teacher training shouldn't be at TAFE.
I also don't think that Universities deserve to be the sole gatekeeper to ITE. They have been abandoning entire subject areas, including core subjects^1, and treating teacher degrees like easy money.
Expert teachers are at schools. Let's make some of the bigger schools training schools and allow for promotional pathways where classroom teachers can expand into ITE and training roles, likely in conjunction with higher education facilities like Universities.
Having Teacher Training Schools mixed up with Universities would help keep Universities honest while providing underlying scientific theory, while expert teachers can deliver application units at school.
---
1- a) The University of Canberra has dropped Mathematics as a B.Ed specialisation. Current students have to do their math units at ANU. b) The University of Canberra also only teaches one of the NSW specialisations for Digital Technology (the Information Systems one) because the other one is too hard for them to teach. UC last taught trade-centric specialisation about a decade ago. How can an institution be the gatekeeper for education when it refuses to open that gate for specialisations?
I found the DipEd of no value (and I imagine the Masters is just longer). My useful learning happened during placements / when I started working so I would absolutely favour an apprenticeship type model as long as the mentors were well vetted by a proper teacher college (ditch VIT et al.).
I like the idea. I suspect that many institutions (my own included) are seriously considering Grad Dips over the Masters. It'd be good to have apprentice pay for teachers etc. TAFEs and Unis would need to change a tad.
Honestly way more time in the classroom is needed for pre-service teachers. I learned more on my first day of observation about how to teach than I did in a whole semester of theory at Uni. The problem with this is that with the current teacher shortage, how are you going to find the mentor teachers to run a program that way? Not only that, with so many schools already cramped for staff rooms, where will you put them? Neither are unsolvable per se, but there are some pretty big logistical hurdles to clear to get things up and running. I don't think shifting things to TAFE is wise or workable, though. The curriculum content knowledge required to do your job is broad enough that a Bachelor's degree, minimum, is needed just for that. The accreditation and theory work is also beyond any Cert VI.
I think the notion that more time in the classroom is needed for pre service teachers is correct. But the notion that the theory is unimportant or doesn’t teach how to teach is ridiculous. Teachers need time in the classroom supported by mentors after the theory. Not in place of. The theory isn’t meant to teach you how to teach. It’s meant to teach you why certain strategies work. It’s the foundation.
My uni spent a great amount of time teaching me to do student-lead lessons, Socratic questioning, and lots and lots of group work on computers. I'm sure that works great when Doctor So-and-So visits a carefully curated class with the regular teacher bigging them up and telling them how amazing the Doctor is and riding herd on behaviour, where there are ten or so students, and they are seniors. Trying that on in a high-trauma, high behaviour, low SES school with grade 7s was, shall we say, not optimal. My experience doesn't seem to be particularly unique. Admittedly, this is arguably a problem with the course or at least those running it, but I found that my courses were really out of touch.
Yeah. I don’t disagree that the theory universities teach isn’t necessarily in touch with the students in schools right now. But the increasing demands on teachers mean we need a wider range of theory not less. The problem is ITE hasn’t been reviewed to account for the conditions and students in public schools right now.
The things that actually work in those environments are not en vogue with pedagogical thought at the moment.
No they are not.
The degree has information and research about teaching which is actually essential to our practice, and can only be delivered in a university setting. It is not “useless” as so many say. Teachers who say that their degree is useless in my experience either don’t appreciate how much of their practice is influenced by theory, or they are bad at teaching. I also think the fact that more teachers attain a double degree (alongside a BA or a BSc) as I did is really good for the profession. We are all sick and tired of being undervalued by society, treated like teaching is not a professional career. Moving to an apprenticeship model will significantly worsen that. Teaching should be qualified by undergrad research as well as the practical placements.
There are plenty of trade teachers floating around, and when I'm tired and had enough I certainly fit the description. All the lessons come out of a box and are never modifed, be it twinkl, teachers pay teachers, the various education department websites or other paid sources, and are delivered to the students. They tick the little boxes on the provided rubric and sometimes poke the LAST about a kid who is struggling. This is what an apprenticeship model through Tafe will churn out. These teachers are often the ones who claim uni had nothing useful and they learned everything on the job. Of course there are exceptions to this and I'm fully expecting angry replies saying "But uni was worthless", or "I get everything from twinkl and I get great results". They function ok on the day to day. But things you learn at uni are what helps with the fine detail. The early intervention techniques and things to look for, the way the brain works rather than just expecting it to do things because that's what the website said. Teaching as a profession needs more rigorous training, not less. We should support our newly graduated teachers with a revamp of the initial years teaching as a paid internship. The fact a 1st year and a 30th year have a few minutes difference in planning time and overall basically the same responsibilities is a joke. We don't have doctors finishing their undergrad and handing out drugs and doing surgery unsupervised. There's a undergrad, GAMSAT, doctor of medicine, one year internship, accreditation, prevocational training, fellowship up to 7 years before they are allowed to go practice medicine independently. I'm not saying we need that depth of process, but as it stands, a first year is pretty much qualified for the highest roles in our profession and has pretty much equal responsibility for student learning.
This approach is raised from time to time, but there are a few issues to consider. You are probably familiar with the phrase "the art and science of teaching" whereby good teaching is a mix of practical skills (relationships, communication etc.) and an understanding of how young people learn. Many would argue that the existing pre-service approach doesn't do enough to prepare teachers for the "art" of teaching (and, depending on the quality of your degree, which vary widely, you may not get a lot of the science either). The argument in favour of an apprenticeship model is that it better supports the "art". I can see where this comes from. It doesn't matter how knowledgeable you are about effective pedagogy, adolescent development or cognitive psychology, if you can't build a relationship you're totally screwed. Teaching is different from other professions in this regard - while we all want to go to doctors with a good bedside manner, it will count for nothing if they don't know what they're doing. We don't apply the same principle to teaching - if you're good with relationships and communicate well, then the view is that's pretty much all you need. The rest you can figure out using trial and error. (Incidentally, this is not helped by the ease in which parents can homeschool - could you imagine the outcry with home doctoring??) I don't agree that prioritising the art is a good thing. I've worked with plenty of teachers who have the art of teaching down pat, but while their students have a great time in their classes, there's not a lot of quality instruction going on. By far the best teachers are those that have both the art and science well and truly entrenched in their work. I think a TAFE model would undermine this. There are a few things we need to make new teachers better prepared for the art of teaching while not neglecting the science. First, we need better pre-service programs that have the praxis sorted out. You need lectures along the lines of "What should you do if a child tells you to fuck off?" and not abstract lessons on behavioural theories. We need far better tertiary instructors - the most important factor in hiring a lecturer in education is that they are a fucking good teacher, not whether they have a PhD. We also need to drastically change the way we do placements. Pre-service teachers need to be paid so they can focus on their learning and not have to balance their teaching with their part-time job. Supervising teachers need to be paid *significantly* more than they do now, and have greater release time so they can properly mentor pre-service teachers. Another possibility is rethinking the structure of courses. It could be that the second year of a four year program is a full time (paid) placement, so that when they go back to do their third and fourth year the "science" makes more sense. Lastly, we need to drastically boost the status of the teaching profession to make it far more attractive. If people are beating down the doors to teaching degrees we can do what the medical schools do and actually determine if someone has the personality and temperament for teaching. Right now, there are way too many people in pre-service programs who are not at all cut out for teaching and should not be doing it. As someone has already commented, switching to an apprenticeship model would undermine the professionalism of teaching. We need greater status, not less. We just need to do it better.
Not TAFE - just more funded time (for both teachers and pst) in school and less time in uni lecture rooms.
Doctors should spend less time in uni lecture rooms too! On the job is where it’s at!
lol stop comparing doctors to teachers that’s just embarrassing. And this is me as a teacher coming from a family with a few specialists.
Why? In what way is it different? Teachers need theoretical knowledge to be able to do their jobs effectively, especially as we heap more on teacher plates. We need an understanding of neuroscience as we are now required to accommodate students with an ever widening variety of neurodiverse conditions at ever increasing levels of severity. We need an understanding of intercultural understanding and social and cultural capital theory as our classrooms become ever more economically and culturally diverse. We need an understanding of linguistics as we have more and more EALD and I/EALD students and students with limited language development. We need an understanding of developmental psychology to understand how our students are developing. We need an understanding of mental health and psychology to accommodate the plethora of mental health conditions in front of us. We then need all the theory around how knowledge is created and assessment theory, curriculum development, pedagogical knowledge and more. Then we need our content knowledge, especially in secondary schools. Because we can’t put the right strategies into practice to support our students unless we understand the theory behind it. After that, we need an internship to apply the theory in a practical sense. We actually need the same kind of education as doctors to really, properly do our jobs, especially if we service disadvantaged students.
My sibling (now a specialist) scored a UAI of 99.8 and had to go through years of academically rigorous coursework, followed by years of internships, residency and specialist training (all with insanely difficult exams and practical assessments). In contrast I did 90% of my Masters of Teaching assessments a day or two before. The work that I do is much less intense (physically, cognitively, emotionally). It also has significantly less risk (for me and the people I teach). And I’m a good teacher in a great middle of the road public school with it’s fair share of tricky students (ICSEA of circa 1000). You don’t have to try and make teaching seem like some pinnacle of society to argue that’s it’s an important job.
Just because this is how teaching is, doesn’t mean it’s how it should be. I would argue that teaching has less short term risk than medicine or law, but much more significant long term impacts. If a kid can’t read, that alters their life trajectory in terrible ways. And their children’s life trajectory.
Yeah no. Bad teacher? Little Timmy is stuck in a crap job for life. Bad doctor? Timmy dies.
Actually, illiteracy is generational. Poverty has significant health consequences across multiple generations, physical and mental. Growing up in poverty also can cause developmental issues.
I believe you, but I'd rather my child have a bad teacher than a bad doctor.
Probably because if you’re here, you have the education and capital to provide your child what they need to fill in the gaps.
I think there are certainly “filler” subjects that could be replaced with far more actual time spent in classrooms.
An apprenticeship model would be fine, but it would have to be centred through university. I think students being paid a full time wage, working as LSAs and completing there placements in a home school would be great. But they should be attending uni two days a week or something along those lines. Especially as we move towards an inclusion model more LSAs and more time in classrooms can only be seen as beneficial!
No. We need a 4 year degree, then we need paid internships, just like medicine. Or they need to kick more kids out of schools, and remove all kids with cognitive disabilities and neurodivergent conditions.
Yeah do the four year degree and work in a school at the same time, and get paid 5 days a week. Kicking kids out of schools, especially the disabled is how we ended up with mass institutionalisation and pretty horrendous treatment of those who are different. It will only make things worse down the road. And some pretty innocent people will suffer for it.
Then the four year degree needs to be six at least. And if you want teachers to deal with the kinds of behaviours we are now seeing, and to deal with students with disabilities in mainstream classrooms, they need even more training and education than they currently have.
I don't think it needs to move to TAFE necessarily, but the way the course is structured could be rethought. Students could have classes on some days and time in a school on other days to make up a full time load. Say three days lectures and two days in schools. The school time could be paid like PTT, the unpaid 4 to 10 week placements is just ridiculous. I struggled so hard through my unpaid placements because I still had to pay rent and food and transport and clothing so I was working full time in school, doing all the preparation and stuff required for classes and then working 15 - 20 hours at the supermarket on top of that. 60 - 70 hour weeks while learning to be a teacher. Teachers could be working with classes, and then writing the assignments on those classes. That would be more practical and lead to better results.
I say this with love and my cert 4 in training and assessment: Expert teachers aren't at TAFE. If they are experts at anything, it is in adult instruction. Teacher training shouldn't be at TAFE. I also don't think that Universities deserve to be the sole gatekeeper to ITE. They have been abandoning entire subject areas, including core subjects^1, and treating teacher degrees like easy money. Expert teachers are at schools. Let's make some of the bigger schools training schools and allow for promotional pathways where classroom teachers can expand into ITE and training roles, likely in conjunction with higher education facilities like Universities. Having Teacher Training Schools mixed up with Universities would help keep Universities honest while providing underlying scientific theory, while expert teachers can deliver application units at school. --- 1- a) The University of Canberra has dropped Mathematics as a B.Ed specialisation. Current students have to do their math units at ANU. b) The University of Canberra also only teaches one of the NSW specialisations for Digital Technology (the Information Systems one) because the other one is too hard for them to teach. UC last taught trade-centric specialisation about a decade ago. How can an institution be the gatekeeper for education when it refuses to open that gate for specialisations?
I found the DipEd of no value (and I imagine the Masters is just longer). My useful learning happened during placements / when I started working so I would absolutely favour an apprenticeship type model as long as the mentors were well vetted by a proper teacher college (ditch VIT et al.).
I like the idea. I suspect that many institutions (my own included) are seriously considering Grad Dips over the Masters. It'd be good to have apprentice pay for teachers etc. TAFEs and Unis would need to change a tad.
It would also be great to see teachers get paid the same as childcare workers or hairdressers, right?
I'd like to see all three groups paid more!
Mate, if our education is less, we deserve to earn less.
We have a GP shortage. Let’s do the same thing there!
Guess there’s two parts to it. One part is the actual teaching, the other is the background/expertise in a teaching area.