University of Newcastle Teachers and Teaching Research Centre

Submitter information

Name

University of Newcastle Teachers and Teaching Research Centre

Where are you located?

New South Wales

What type of area do you live in?

Regional or rural

Are you an education professional?
(e.g. teacher, school leader, learning support assistant, teacher’s aide)

Yes

Which sector do you work in?

Higher Education

What is your occupation?

Education researcher

Elevating the profession

The actions proposed recognise the value teachers bring to students, communities and the economy.

Somewhat agree

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

The status of teachers and teaching is at the heart of the current teacher shortages. Valuing teachers and raising the status of the profession have been enduring challenges of the field. Teachers are frequently subject to harsh criticisms and unfairly blamed for falling education standards.

We applaud the initiatives detailed in Actions 1, 2 and 3 aimed at boosting the public image of teachers. However, positive publicity only addresses part of the problem surrounding the valuing of teachers (and is difficult to govern). The higher education sector has grappled with this same challenge by addressing quality through metrics like awards and student feedback rather than building capacity for quality teaching, which leaves large parts of the workforce disaffected. We argue for a more holistic approach that values teachers as professionals undertaking challenging and rewarding work.

Teaching is and should be seen as intellectually (and emotionally) demanding work. Respecting the professionalism of teachers by recognising the importance of the theoretical and practical knowledge required for good teaching is paramount. Calls to reduce the length of post-graduate teaching degrees, rhetoric about recruiting the “best and brightest” teachers, and policing who enters teaching through measures like LANTITE, which are not supported by research, all work counter to policy objectives.

Recommendations:
1. End the rhetoric about “best and brightest” teachers.
2. Commission programmatic research on teacher education, possibly through establishing the Centre for Excellence proposed by the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review.

Improving teacher supply

The actions proposed will be effective in increasing the number of students entering ITE, number of students completing ITE and the number of teachers staying in and/or returning to the profession.

Somewhat agree

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

Our research found teaching to be the second most popular career aspiration among students in NSW government schools in Years 3-12. Prior academic achievement was not a significant predictor of interest in teaching – many high achieving students want to pursue teaching as a career. Our research found a higher proportion of girls and a higher proportion of Indigenous students were interested in teaching, whereas students in the middle years of schooling showed less interest.

Our research shows that equitable access to higher education is more complicated than overcoming crude barriers such as money, distance and prior education. It is important that the initiatives described in Actions 5 and 6 are targeted and considerate of cultural and socio-economic complexities. Implementation strategies should include: allocating places for students from underrepresented groups (at all universities, including prestigious institutions); offering targeted early entry schemes that do not rely solely on academic measures; and, providing financial support through scholarships and fellowships for disadvantaged students.

Another positive initiative designed to nurture students’ interest in teaching is a NSW high school’s “future teacher program” which takes students between Years 8 and 12 through a structured program where they have opportunities to teach in local primary schools, and learn more about what it is to teach and what it takes to become a teacher.
Based on our existing research, we developed a free 10-hour accredited online professional development course (aspirations.edu.au) that explores how aspirations are formed and provides strategies for teachers and career advisers to nurture aspirations in their students.

Recommendations:
1. Consider cultural and socio-economic complexities when implementing targeted higher education scholarship and placement allocation.
2. Promote the free Aspirations professional development course to teachers, school leaders and community members.
3. Streamline accreditation and registration processes across Australian jurisdictions.
4. Evaluate the effectiveness of the "future teachers program".

Strengthening Initial Teacher Education (ITE)

The actions proposed will ensure initial teacher education supports teacher supply and quality.

Somewhat agree

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

The ITE curriculum is crowded and fragmented, making it hard to provide the kind of program coherence that ensures graduates feel well prepared. A unifying framework, such as the Quality Teaching (QT) Model would enhance quality and coherence in ITE programs and help build both the confidence of ITE students and their confidence in the profession in ways that impact positively on retention and completion rates in ITE and the quality of graduates.

The QT Model is comprised of elements of practice for which there is evidence of impact on student outcomes. It was developed in 2003 by Associate Professor James Ladwig and Laureate Professor Jenny Gore at the University of Newcastle. The Model was commissioned by the NSW Department of Education and has been its endorsed pedagogical framework ever since.

Pilot studies of QT in ITE have delivered exciting results for final year students at the University of Newcastle. Participants reported greater confidence in their ability to teach, including motivating students, using a variety of teaching and assessment strategies, and successfully managing student behaviour. They also reported reduced pre-internship stress and less desire to leave the profession. Broader studies in the sector should follow.

Recently, there have been calls to reduce the two-year master’s degree requirement especially for mid-career professionals in priority areas, such as engineers and accountants, so they can transfer into teaching via a single year graduate diploma or other accelerated program. While this might be a partial solution to dire teacher shortages now, it runs counter to the aim of raising the status of teaching and risks sending underprepared teachers into classrooms, exacerbating burn out and attrition. Short ITE programs are not the solution.

Recommendations
1. Pilot use of the Quality Teaching Model in ITE programs at several universities.
2. Commission research on ITE program length and maintain current standards until evidence is available.
3. Commission programmatic research on teacher education, possibly through establishing the Centre for Excellence proposed by the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review.

Maximising the time to teach

The actions proposed will improve retention and free up teachers to focus on teaching and collaboration.

Somewhat agree

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

We wholly support initiatives aimed at reducing burden, red tape and administrative load on teachers. Our research shows that teachers and school leaders are feeling increasingly under pressure and overburdened. Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the major sources of stress for teachers – workloads, student behaviour, and expectations. The need to cover additional classes has limited teachers’ time for planning, assessment and professional development, adding to their workloads and reducing their morale.

It is important that initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload are developed in consultation with representatives from the profession to avoid them inadvertently devaluing teachers and their work. Recent announcements by the NSW Government highlight this important balance.

The announcement of an outsourced program to develop curriculum resources and lesson plans, while seemingly useful, alienated teachers who regard these activities as integral to their professional practice. Engaging with teachers to determine their needs is crucial.

We urge caution regarding Action 18 and the deployment of ITE students in the classroom. Without adequate support from an already stretched workforce, this initiative risks exacerbating burn out. Furthermore, awarding conditional accreditation to ITE students runs the risk of devaluing teacher education and other strategies, including LANTITE and the Teaching Performance Assessments, designed to ensure that all students have teachers who are fully prepared to provide high quality teaching.

In our research, teachers are frequently crying out for time to plan, collaborate and engage in meaningful professional development. We argue that this is the best course of action to genuinely deliver positive change. A national teacher and school leader development strategy should be created to ensure consistency and quality for teachers across Australia throughout their teaching career.

Recommendations:
1. Develop a national teacher and school leader development strategy.
2. Ensure time for collaboration and high-quality professional development is built into workforce agreements.

Better understanding future teacher workforce needs

How effective are the proposed actions in better understanding future teacher workforce needs, including the number of teachers required?

Moderately effective

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

Research will be critical to understanding the future needs of the teaching profession. Initiatives should include voices from across disciplines including demography, business, psychology, sociology, linguistics, STEM, health, and education.

Actions 19, 20, and 23 are of critical importance. The need to improve the evidence base in education is clear. Too often, evidence in education and initial teacher education comes from small scale and/or methodologically weak studies.

The prevalence of low-quality research in Australian education is not a slight on researchers – Australia has a great number of eminent researchers undertaking world-leading research in education. Rather, educational research is limited by the funding available in the field. Over the past 20 years, Education has received just 1.6 per cent of all grant funding provided by the ARC. The average grant in Education over that same period is $358,164 (compared to $472,273 for all fields), which is wildly insufficient to carry out the kind of large-scale, systematic and/ or longitudinal research required to genuinely inform education policy and practice.

Making data available to the nation’s researchers, including inter-jurisdictional datasets such as NAPLAN, would significantly reduce the costs of running the kinds of large, longitudinal, programmatic education research that would provide the meaningful evidence to inform policy reform and improve educational outcomes at scale. AERO is well positioned to lead the negotiation between jurisdictions and national bodies that hold important data such as ACARA and AITSL, and the brokerage of rigorous academic research in education. This kind of research could properly inform policy and practice for both better understanding our future workforce needs and lifting outcomes for education more broadly.

Recommendation:
1. Empower AERO to negotiate access to national datasets for Australian educational researchers and to commission rigorous experimental research.
2. Streamline research ethics approval processes across jurisdictions.

Better career pathways to support and retain teachers in the profession

The proposed actions will improve career pathways, including through streamlining the process for Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT) accreditation, and providing better professional support for teachers to retain them in the profession.

Somewhat agree

Would you like to provide feedback about these actions?

We applaud the government’s commitment to expanding Quality Teaching Rounds to improve learning outcomes and support teachers, as outlined in Action 28.

Through our Building Capacity project (funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation), we have conducted multiple randomised controlled trials, case studies and longitudinal analyses to examine the impact of QTR. To date, QTR has positively impacted more than 3,500 teachers and 400,000 students. Research on QTR repeatedly shows positive effects for teachers and students.

First identified in our 2014-2015 randomised controlled trial (RCT) and replicated in both our 2019 RCT and the 2021 QTR Digital RCT, the evidence of positive effects of participation in QTR for teacher morale and teaching quality is compelling.

Building capacity for quality teaching should improve student achievement. To date, two studies have demonstrated that QTR improves student achievement:

1. The 2019 RCT identified two month’s additional growth in mathematics achievement, and one month’s (non-statistically significant) additional growth in reading achievement for students in Years 3 and 4 over the 8-month study period, relative to the control group;

2. The 2021 QTR Digital RCT identified two-month additional growth in reading achievement for primary school students in regional, remote and small schools over the 8-month study period, relative to the control group.

In these studies, two teachers per school attended a two-day QTR workshop before returning to school to lead four teachers through four-days of in-school Rounds without further external input. In 2019, the workshops were facilitated by researchers/program developers. In 2021, the workshops were facilitated by trained “QTR Advisers”. This single “set” of in-school Rounds achieved these striking results for students. Our qualitative evidence strongly suggests that these results are sustained over time.

Recommendation
1. Secure multi-jurisdictional support for systematic implementation of Quality Teaching Rounds to achieve widespread and rapid benefits for teachers and students.