Australia Association for Research in Education
quality teaching
Why we must talk about teacher professionalism now
In 2016, Judyth Sachs reflected on her 2003 monograph ‘The Activist Teaching Profession’ and asked, ‘Teacher professionalism: Why are we still talking about it?‘. In that paper, she argued ‘the time for an industrial approach to the teaching profession has passed’ and made a case for ‘systems, schools and teachers to be more research active …
Will the Quality Time Action Plan reduce teacher workload?
Teachers want more time for lesson planning, not less. Last week, the NSW Department of Education released the Quality Time Action Plan, intended to “simplify administrative practices in schools”. Having highlighted the concerning growth in administrative workload in schools in a report based on a survey of more than 18,000 teachers for the NSW Teachers …
What to do when our schools run out of the teachers they urgently need
When faced with a teacher shortage, often schools need to ‘make do’ and ask teachers to teach away from their area of expertise in order to staff classes. That’s called teaching out-of-field and sometimes teachers, put in that position, can feel unsupported and overwhelmed. The issue of teaching ‘out-of-field’ persists in Australia and internationally – …
Beginner teachers are NOT under prepared and NOT bad at managing behaviour. Here’s the evidence
For years claims have been circulating that newly graduated teachers are under prepared to teach in today’s often challenging classrooms, and that they are bad at classroom management. Thanks to mainstream media interest, and critics within education circles, these claims have led to an increasing array of government interventions in Initial Teacher Education in universities …
Put professional judgement of teachers first or we’ll never get the systemic education improvements we all want. Let’s talk about it
In this blog I’d like to bring together three different lines of educational analysis to show how our …
Listen to the children. This is what ‘good’ teaching looks like to them
Much has been researched, written and debated about what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher. Conversations in Australia continue around quality teaching and teacher quality and the way we educate our teachers. Governments at national and state levels have specifically designed and established teacher accreditation regimes to produce ‘good’ teachers. But despite the proliferation …
TeachING quality is not teachER quality. How we talk about ‘quality’ matters
The language we use to discuss the work of teachers in the public domain matters. It matters to our shared understanding of education as a society and it impacts on teachers’ work both directly and indirectly. My research at the moment focuses in part on the notion of quality in education, specifically how issues of …
Do we need to raise scores for entry into teacher education courses in Australia?
A fierce debate is raging at the moment in political and education circles about the quality of recruits …
Roll back curriculum constraints and give teachers the freedom to make professional judgements
The role of the teacher in an Australian classroom is changing, and not in a good way. As I see it, the relentless pressure for schools to perform well in NAPLAN, the demands of various mandated curriculum and the ubiquitous concerns about ‘quality teaching’ are making teachers lose confidence in their own professional abilities. There …
Donnelly and Wiltshire offer ‘expert’ advice on how our teachers should teach, but how expert are they?
My Facebook and Twitter feeds have been awash with irate teachers for a number of months now, as a constant trickle of announcements, leaks and policy statements from our federal and state governments and political parties have grown into what can be viewed as an attack on Australian teachers, curriculum, and public schools. The most …