Opinion & Commentary
Teacher training must be assessed
In the past decade there has been increasing recognition that the quality of schooling is pretty much dependent on the quality of teaching.
Academics and teaching organisations are acknowledging what parents have long known. Some teachers are better than others and good teaching (and bad, for that matter) has a lasting and cumulative effect on students.
New research by Bill Louden presented at the Our Schools Our Future Conference in Melbourne yesterday finds that an outstanding teacher can put students on a higher achievement trajectory for years into the future.
We are getting a clearer picture of what good teaching looks like and what characterises a good teacher. However, we don't know how to create them.
There are two conflicting sets of research findings.
One says that teacher education courses, whether pre-service or post-graduate, have little or no impact on teacher effectiveness.
The other says that quality teachers are the result of quality teacher education programs.
These perspectives seem irreconcilable but this does not mean teacher education is ineffective -- just that many existing programs seem to be. That is the view of the Australian Secondary Principals Association, which described pre-service teacher education as ``extremely poor''.
Since 1979 there have been 102 reviews of teaching training. Each has contributed to awareness of the problem with teacher preparation, but none has had a measurable impact on overall quality.
Why is this so? Program evaluation in this country is woeful. There has been no proper audit or assessment of individual teacher education programs and the calibre of their graduates.
We should be interested in the opinions of principals and teachers about how well the programs prepared them for the classroom.
Most importantly, we need to know the impact of teacher education on students.
There is a great resistance within the education profession to the idea that teachers should be evaluated according to how much their students learn, but what could be more important?
In an indepth review of teacher education in the US, Arthur Levine found that, as in Australia, quality of teacher preparation was highly variable. He recommended that student achievement should be the primary measure of the success of teacher education.
Too much is made of teacher education programs because they meet quality criteria and are in alignment with professional frameworks. These programs sound, look and feel good but whether they deliver the desired results, we simply do not know.
Program evaluation that follows graduate teachers into school and measures their effectiveness initially and over time is essential.
A little less conversation, a little more action, please.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centrefor Independent Studies
